The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  I looked down at my phone. There was a Twitter notification with a link to the Manahatta article. I tapped on it and scrolled down to the byline. Joan Lurie. Hadn’t she been one of Sylvia’s protégées? I tapped on the reporter’s name and a picture of an attractive, although rather severe, young woman appeared on the screen. She looked familiar—hadn’t she been the reporter assigned to the fundraiser last year? I remembered thinking that she was exactly Simon’s type. How she must have been laughing at me behind my back.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone is following us, Mrs. Osgood,” the driver said. “Shall I take the Saw Mill back to Ardsley?”

  Ardsley. I visualized the empty, echoing rooms of our beautiful center-hall Colonial. Then I looked down at the picture of the reporter. The woman who had just ruined my perfect night. The woman who had just ruined my life.

  “No,” I said, “there’s something I need to do downtown first.”

  Chapter Three

  Joan

  I CAME TO on the floor of my living room—well, living room/dining room/kitchen—but I was closer to the coffee table than the fold-out couch, so let’s say living room. At least I’m not on the couch, I thought groggily—it felt as if my head was stuffed with cotton balls—as if not being in proximity to my bed meant I hadn’t been raped.

  Had I been raped?

  I was still wearing the shirt and blouse I’d gone to work in that day—the day before, I realized, squinting in the hot sun coming through the dirty glass of my one barred window—but I wasn’t wearing pantyhose.

  Had I worn pantyhose?

  No, Sylvia scoffed when I did. So ’80s.

  But I was wearing panties.

  They were damp.

  But then again, so was my whole body. I was drenched in sweat, the bright sun turning my apartment into a greenhouse.

  Someone had attacked me. A stranger? Someone who saw me stumbling drunkenly along the sidewalk? They—he, screw the gender-neutral pronoun—must have followed me into the building and up the stairs and I’d been too drunk to notice. I touched my scalp gingerly and found a hard, moist lump. I drew back my fingers and stared at the blood.

  Then I touched myself between my legs.

  I’d interviewed a woman who’d been roofied when she was in college. The worst thing, she said, was waking up the next day and not knowing what had been done to her.

  Could you tell? I’d asked her.

  I had bruises on my inner thighs, she’d said, and . . . you know . . . semen.

  My thighs don’t feel bruised. There’s none of the tenderness that I feel after even consensual sex. Nothing’s . . . sticky.

  I start to cry. I’m not sure if it’s relief or not. I don’t know anything for sure. How can I? Someone grabbed me, chloroformed me, and pushed me into my apartment. Someone handled my unconscious body like it was a piece of meat. Someone . . .

  Could still be here.

  I push myself up. My shabby studio apartment swirls like a carnival ride, bits of my life flashing by like dioramas. Clothes spilling out of the tiny closet, a view of the rust-stained toilet, a cereal bowl and mug on the plywood counter that serves as a kitchen, the butcher-block table I use as a desk.

  My laptop. Although my head is still spinning I struggle to my feet. No one is here—that’s one advantage of living in a shoebox; there’s no place to hide—but what did they take? My laptop has all my notes. Three years’ worth of research. I don’t use the Cloud because I don’t trust it; I didn’t want anyone scooping me on this story. I wouldn’t even use the computers at Manahatta. Everything I have is on that laptop and a three-inch-long flash drive on my keychain.

  The key chain is on the floor, glinting in the merciless sun next to my wallet and purse. The wallet is empty, but I can’t recall whether I had cash in it or not, and even though the credit cards are gone, my attacker isn’t going to get much joy out of those; I’ve maxed out every card I have.

  The laptop is on my desk.

  I feel a sense of relief that’s greater than what I’d felt at finding that I hadn’t been raped—and then a wave of deep shame. What kind of a person is more concerned about their hard drive than their body?

  A professional, I imagine Simon saying. Which makes me feel a tiny bit better as I rush to the bathroom to throw up.

  EVEN THOUGH MY head feels like an ice pick has been lodged in my frontal lobe, I don’t go to the hospital. Stupid, right? I do have insurance, courtesy of Manahatta, so I can’t even use that as an excuse. I don’t call the police. No excuse for that either. How many times have I asked a source why she didn’t report Osgood to the police?

  I didn’t think it was a crime.

  I was ashamed.

  I was afraid I’d lose my job.

  Well, I know attacking me and breaking into my apartment are crimes. And I do feel ashamed that I’d instinctually been more worried about my laptop than my virtue and that I’d stumbled home drunk, stupidly not checking behind me when I came in the front door. As for my job, I’m not going to lose it, but I wonder what a police report will do to the story. Will it look like a ploy for publicity? Will it seem awfully coincidental?

  If nothing else it will distract from the story, and I’ve worked too hard for too long—and asked too many women to trust me—to let myself get in the way of this story. At least I’d better have a look at how it’s playing before I go adding to the noise.

  I find my phone inside my purse. Dead. I plug it in and open my laptop.

  At first I think it’s broken. A sick joke from my attacker. The screen is so blurry I can’t read a thing. I thump the trackpad, twirl the cursor around the screen, click through several open tabs, and then look down at the keyboard to reboot—

  Only, the keyboard is blurry too. The glowing letters look like ancient runes rising up out of murky water. I lift a page of typescript from one of the piles and can’t make out a word of it. I rub my eyes, but that only makes my headache worse. Is blurred vision a symptom of concussion? Or chloroform poisoning? I immediately think to google it and then laugh at myself. Even if I could navigate the screen well enough to type in the search, I couldn’t read the results. Now would be the time that one of those voice-activated digital assistants would come in handy, but I’ve prudishly refused to buy one on the grounds that they’re spy bots and represent an invasion of privacy.

  So instead I let an attacker in my front door.

  No, I correct myself, I didn’t let anyone in. Why would I even think of it that way? It’s as if all the skepticism I’d trained myself to wield (You have to ask the skeptical questions before the reader can, Simon told me) is now aimed at myself.

  The screen in front of me dissolves into a grainy film as I begin to cry. The tears feel like they’re rising up inside me, like floodwaters that will close over my head to complete the job my attacker set out to do. All the carefully constructed stories I’ve told myself over the last three years fall away and I’m right back where I was when I got fired from the Globe—a fuck-up, the kind of careless, stupid girl who gets herself in trouble—

  My phone begins chiming, breaking into the pity-fest I’m throwing for myself . . . and chimes and chimes and chimes, loading messages and tweets and Facebook notifications and Google alerts I have set for my name and Caspar Osgood’s. The world is weighing in on the story I’ve worked on for three years, and I can’t read a word of it.

  Then I recall that my phone does have a built-in voice-activated feature. I press the Home button and an electronic voice asks how she can help me. Hey Siri, how do you know if you’ve been raped? I imagine asking. Or: How can I tell if I have a brain injury? But instead I ask my phone to read me my messages.

  I have 53 new text messages, 235 Twitter notifications, and 7 voicemails. I begin with the voicemails, figuring anyone actually calling me must have something important to say (or is at least older than thirty). Three are from my mother congratulating me on the story but wondering if I wasn’t going to have a lot of people mad
at me. I can hear the anxiety in her voice warring with her pride in me. One is from Sam asking if I got home all right. Two are from Simon, first telling me that he’d gotten a threatening call from Osgood at eight A.M., the second that Osgood had resigned his post as publisher of the Globe by noon.

  Noon? Is it really that late? I can’t read the time on my phone to find out.

  “You took him down, kid. You did it. Call when you get this.”

  The last call was from someone named Andrea Robbins. It takes me a moment to realize Andrea is the literary agent I spoke to at the party last night.

  “I put out some feelers,” she says. “Give me a five-hundred-word pitch and I could get you a book deal by next Friday. Send it to ARobbins@Lit.com.”

  I start to laugh. I can’t even read my emails. How am I going to type up five hundred words—

  But then I remember that when I pitched the story to Simon properly, as he’d requested at our interview, he said that what I’d written was a book pitch and not an article pitch. Too broad, too wordy, too melodramatic. I’d redrafted four times before he accepted it—an exercise, I’d realized later, that was more about teaching me to write than about making up his mind to do the story. He’d always meant to do the story.

  For revenge? I wonder, recalling what Sylvia had said at the party last night, but I push the thought away.

  I still have the first draft of that pitch somewhere on the hard drive of my laptop. It might as well be at the bottom of the ocean, though, for all I’m able to get to it. My laptop has no voice-activated software. I could call up someone to help—Sam, for instance—but I realize as I picture Sam coming here that I can’t face another human being right now.

  I look down at the screen again, hoping my vision has cleared, but it hasn’t. Dimly I realize that I’ve got bigger problems than emailing a book proposal to an agent. What if that blow detached my retina? What if I’m going blind? What if I have been raped? What if I’m pregnant or have been exposed to an STD? I should be going to the hospital. I should be calling the police.

  Instead, I fumble my way into my email—at least it’s the first open tab on the screen—and touch-type Andrea’s email address into the recipient line, blessing the literary gods for that pretentiously brief agency name. I manage to find the attachment icon and then, grateful I have my documents preset to list alphabetically, click on the first icon, which I know is labeled “Amanda Story Pitch,” which I’d named for my first source. I think of all those women whose stories are saved in my hard drive—and hesitate. There’s so much more than what made it into the article—Simon was a ruthless pruner—that I don’t think I’d have any trouble finding the material for a book, but not all of those women were willing to have their stories told in full. It seems, too, a different matter to use their stories to land a book deal. The Manahatta story was one thing—Caspar Osgood had to be exposed—but what’s my justification for a book?

  Money, a voice that sounds like Sylvia’s suggests, so you can live in a neighborhood where you don’t get attacked in your own home.

  Like many of Sylvia’s ripostes, this one sounds eminently reasonable. I click on the file and then touch-type a brief message, which I hope says “How’s this?” and not “Giq;a rgua>”

  It’s a bit cavalier, but I imagine it’s what Sylvia would do. I’m not sure when she became my role model, but as I click Send I feel a little thrill of accomplishment wholly at odds with my current disheveled and battered state.

  “I will not let this define me,” I say out loud, startling myself with the sound of my own voice. I don’t sound like myself at all.

  IN THE END, I don’t call the police and I don’t go to the hospital. At first I tell myself that I can always change my mind, but after a day goes by I realize that I wouldn’t know how to explain why I hadn’t gone to the police earlier. Several of the women I spoke to told me the same thing about why they waited so long to tell anyone what Caspar Osgood did to them. They were shocked and ashamed at first, and then by the time they felt ready to talk about it they were embarrassed they hadn’t come forward sooner—and thought people wouldn’t believe them because they hadn’t said something right away.

  The irony that I find myself trapped in the same cycle of shame only makes it worse. How could I, having listened to all those stories, not have gone straight to the police? And how could I, having spent three years collecting evidence of sexual assault, think I was immune to it? Again and again I replay myself stumbling drunkenly from a taxi, letting myself into my building without a backward glance, climbing those darkened stairs deaf to following footsteps. How could I, knowing all that I know about how these things happen, have been so stupid to let this happen?

  I couldn’t bear to let the world know—and I knew the minute I went to the hospital it would come out. My name was already all over the Internet and tabloids. Joan Lurie hunts down the lurid details. (Simon had warned me there’d be puns.) Former Fashion Blogger Busts Big Cheese. (And alliteration.) Gotham Girl Slays Goliath. (And biblical references.)

  I could imagine what the tabloids and blogs would make of my being attacked. I didn’t want the story to be any more about me than it already was. Which was the reason I gave Simon for not doing any interviews as they came in. I told him I wanted to lie low and he gave me leave from the magazine for an indefinite period. Whatever you need, kid, he’d said, you’ve earned it. To keep him—or anyone else from the office—from visiting, I said I was going upstate to visit my mother for a couple of days. And for a dreadful few moments I even thought I would go. The idea of retreating to the safety of my childhood home was dangerously appealing, but I couldn’t bear for my mother to know what had happened to me. It would confirm all her fears about me living in New York City, and she had enough on her plate taking care of my senile grandmother. I told myself I was staying away to spare her, and not because I was afraid that if I went home I might never have the courage to leave again.

  My mother hadn’t. When she came back from the city pregnant with me she never went back. Not a good place to raise a child, especially as a single mother, she told me when I asked, and then your grandmother needed my help when she started losing her memory. But I’d always heard a tinge of regret in her voice, a sense of missed opportunities that she’d sacrificed on the altar of motherhood and filial responsibility. I suspected, also, that her moving was a surrender to my grandmother’s anxieties, which only got worse as her mind became untethered. I didn’t want to have that regret. I didn’t want to give in to my fears.

  So instead of hiding upstate I hid in my apartment, listening to Siri recite the symptoms of concussion from WebMD. I ordered food from FreshDirect and the noodle shop on the corner. I paid with an app and asked the delivery people to leave the food outside the door. I opened the door only after looking through the peephole to make sure there was no one waiting in the hall to knock me over the head. Even then, my heart pounded during the seconds when the door was open. The air in the hallway seemed to pulse with malign intent; the stairwell gaped like an open mouth; menacing shadows lurked in my peripheral vision—all symptoms of concussion, according to WebMD.

  After the first few days, I stopped trying to read texts and emails and put an away message on my email account. I let any call go to voicemail and didn’t bother listening to the message. I told my mother that I was turning my phone off to avoid reporters. I barely paid attention to Andrea Robbins’s emails showing me the pitch letter she’d drafted and the list of editors she was sending it to. I even stopped listening to the reactions to my story on social media. Even the positive reactions praising my intrepid investigative reporting rang false to me. How intrepid had I been in avoiding an attack in my own home? The negative reactions attacking my objectivity rang truer. Who was I, a twenty-nine-year-old style reporter, to take down the Great Caspar Osgood? Hadn’t I been fired from an internship at the Globe? I’d written the story as revenge and was trying to make my own name at the expense of his.

/>   Had I been acting out of revenge? I wondered, trying to sift through the disordered mess in my head. Hadn’t I been preening at the party? Isn’t that why I’d been so oblivious and drunk on my own success that I’d gotten myself attacked?

  AFTER THREE WEEKS of castigating myself, my ego was more bruised than my eyes. I decided to try a walk up to the corner Rite-Aid. Although I still didn’t think I’d been raped I felt that I needed to take a pregnancy test—and I knew that if I ordered it from FreshDirect it would show up on my shopping history, which Sam swore could be hacked.

  I put on sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a sweatshirt even though it was sweltering outside. I kept my head down and hoped people thought I was a celebrity (which I probably was by this point) and not a drug dealer. Halfway up the block I felt sure someone was following me. When I turned my head a shadow skittered away, but the sidewalk was empty. I kept walking, but the feeling persisted, as if someone were lurking just on the edge of my vision. I used a trick my mother taught me and glanced into a plate-glass window to check for pursuers. I was startled by the sight of a hunchbacked thug in a hoodie—and then realized it was me.

  My heart was pounding so hard by the time I got to the Rite-Aid that I thought I might be having a heart attack. I tossed the pregnancy test, along with half a dozen unnecessary toiletries, into a basket. As I reached for a tube of hand cream I saw something move to my left. I spun around so fast I knocked down a display of sunscreen. But this time I did see someone darting into the next aisle. Someone in a hoodie and dark glasses like me. I walked stiffly toward the counter, keeping an eye out for my doppelgänger, but there was no one at the checkout but a bored cashier flipping through a copy of the Post. As I approached she held it up and I saw the top part of the headline—big enough for even me to read: SEX ADDICT NEWSMAN . . .