Last Train to Babylon

by Charlee Fam

  “Sure,” he says, facing me, his free hand lingering near his gun, as if he’s trained to always be ready, even in a place like Seaport.

  “Well, this is kind of a weird question,” I say. He’s cute, not much older than I am, maybe late twenties. But he doesn’t seem amused. I’m being sort of flirty, but don’t think I’m coming off drunk or anything. “What is your protocol for assault?”

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  “What do you mean?” he says. “Have you been assaulted?” His tone gets all serious, and I’m starting to regret this whole thing. It was sort of a spontaneous detour after I’d left my house for a cigarette—something I’d played out in my head hundreds of times over the past five years.

  I’ve played that night over and over again, how the cop rolled down his window, how he asked if I was okay, if I needed help. I remember pausing, holding those words in my throat, wondering how everything would change if I just spoke up and actually stood up for myself. But then he’d crushed any courage I’d had with that question: Have you been drinking? And I knew I didn’t have a shot in hell.

  “No, no,” I say. “I mean, if a girl comes in here, and says she’s been assaulted, sexually,” I add, “what are you trained to do? Is she presumed guilty or innocent until proven whatever? Is it a felony if she lies? Even if she’s not lying, like if someone just assumes she’s lying? Or says she’s lying? What’s considered a valid report?” He looks at me like I’m a moron and takes his hand away from his holster. I sweep my hair out of my eyes. I’m feeling self-conscious, but I don’t want the guy to realize, so I shift my weight on one foot and act relaxed.

  “All reports are considered valid and taken seriously until proven otherwise.”

  “What happens next? Do you call parents? Is it confidential?”

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  “Well, if the parties involved are minors, then yes, we will have to call parents.”

  “What if she doesn’t want her parents to find out?”

  “Well, then there’s not much we can do,” he says. He eyes me. “Is there something you’re trying to say here?” I shake my head.

  “This is all hypothetical,” I say. He still looks at me kind of funny. “I’m twenty-three, do you want my license?” He smiles and shakes his head.

  “Well, if a female victim reports a crime, we will interview her and suggest that she file an official report and go to a hospital for an examination,” he says. “Any more questions?”

  “But what if her story is off? Like if she can’t remember, because she’s nervous or whatever?”

  “Why are you asking all of this? Are you trying to report something? I hate to cut this short, but I kind of have someplace to be.”

  “Research,” I cut in. “I’m a writer.”

  “Okay,” he says. “But I’m actually headed to a friend’s wake now. If you do need to talk more, I can give you my number.” I suck in air and shake my head. Of course he’s headed to a wake.

  “Rachel?” I deadpan.

  “You knew her? It’s terrible. We dated a few years back. Briefly,” he adds.

  “I knew of her,” I say. I smile, thank him, and walk a straight line back toward my house.

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  ON THE WALK back, I spark up another cigarette. Things are different now than they were five years ago. There weren’t any Steubenvilles or Maryvilles. There was just silence. Even if I was to open my mouth all those years ago, I have a feeling I would have found out quickly who my real friends were, and maybe it’s just a hunch, but I’m pretty sure that number would’ve been low—if not in the negatives.

  The closest thing Seaport had—aside from that fleeting Max Sullivan scandal—was this girl Heather Something, from a town over. She’d been a year or two younger than Eli. Some guys in his grade had gotten her piss drunk at a homecoming party, passed her around with her pants around her ankles, and recorded it all on an iPhone. Apparently the entire county saw the video. I was already in my second or third year of college, so I’d been pretty far removed from the whole ordeal. But I heard the gist of it when I came home for Thanksgiving.

  People laughed, because that was the easiest emotion for them to emulate—at least that’s what Eli told me. They called the girl a slut, because it was better for everyone to point the finger at the drunk girl who nobody really cared about than to blame a group of promising young athletes for just having a little fun. The girl never filed a report. Eventually, she moved. Last I’d heard, she drank some bleach and was hospitalized briefly, before transferring to a town in Suffolk.

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  She got what she deserved, I’d heard someone say. I’d been home for Thanksgiving and was in line to buy coffee. These two bearded men in puffy vests quipped at each other. They were probably football dads, making excuses for the boys who could have just as easily been their own sons. I knew they were talking about that Heather girl. That’s just what happens when girls get sloppy. That’s God’s way of punishing them. Eli stood next to me, and we simultaneously rolled our eyes. I don’t think he knew the extent to which those words cut me. I hid it well. I had for years. But as we approached the counter to order, he turned to the men and said, “With all due respect, I think hangovers are God’s way of giving drunks what they deserve.”

  Part of me envied that girl—wondered what it would be like to have that video, to have that moment immortalized, to be able to look back and have proof, actual hard evidence, even for myself. Maybe then, I could see if I’d done enough. I’d know if I said no. If I fought hard enough. Because each time I play it back in my head, each time I let the events unfold, he gets a little less cruel, and I become more passive, and it all muddles together, like some big misunderstanding.

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  Chapter 22

  April 2009.

  IT WAS ALREADY Easter, and I wasn’t ready for it. Still, nothing had been resolved. I tried to keep to myself, but Rachel always found ways to trap me into a ride home or catch up with me at my locker.

  “Why no talk?” She’d been standing behind me as I fumbled with my car keys in the back school parking lot. We’d always driven together, but that week I’d been taking my own car. She knew something was up, I just didn’t know how much information she had.

  “Just a busy week. Haven’t been feeling great, you know?” I said.

  “Yup, I know.” She looked at me kind of funny, and I faked a smile, wishing I hadn’t given her that opening.

  She leaned against the passenger’s-side door, dangling her own keys in her hand, and just started lobbing questions at me.

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  “So what’s going on with Adam? If you never met up on his birthday, where did you end up going?”

  I felt my face go hot, but I was careful, gave vague answers, and tried to deflect the questions back at her.

  “I really don’t know. I guess we’re over. How about you? What’s going on with Rod?”

  I placed my books down on the driver’s seat, and I noticed for the first time that my hands were shaking. Rachel quirked her eyebrows.

  “Caffeine,” I said, and turned to her, stuffing my hands in my back pockets.

  “So, have you talked to him?”

  “Who?”

  “Adam. God, Aub, aren’t you listening?”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m pretty sure we’re over. I just said that.”

  “Oh, right. You did,” she said. And then she just shrugged and smiled like she was stifling some sort of secret.

  MY MOTHER’S FAMILY came for Easter, the Irish side, making small talk, spitting witty banter at each other over half-eaten plates of ham. I feigned amusement at Cousin Peter’s back-in-the-day college stories, like they were supposed to get me amped for my own impending journey. We all laughed, pushed around the mashed potatoes with our forks, and smiled politely.

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  The Cavanaughs never talked about anything serious—I think it’s an Irish thing. When my parents announced their divorce six years earlier, my mother’s side never me
ntioned my father again. They never asked my brothers and me how we were doing, how Dad was doing. They just pretended like he never even existed. The Glass side though—the half-Italian, half-Jewish, all-drama side—called at least once a week to make sure we were handling it okay. My uncles would hug me for a lingering uncomfortable extra second, pat me on the back, and say, How are you doing, huh? How’s Mom? Everything okay? Everything good?

  Divorce never bothered me. It was something to be expected. The sort of thing that happened to everyone, and I’d never really gotten too bent over it.

  So I was relieved to spend this Easter with the Cavanaughs. Even if they knew something was off with me, even if they could see it, even if it were written all over my face, they would never try to make me talk about it.

  It always baffled me as to why Karen became a guidance counselor. She was part of the impermeable Irish, yet spent her days trying to break through to middle school brats who were hung up on their own parents’ divorce.

  Grandma Kath of Connecticut—that’s how she introduced herself: Katherine L. Cavanaugh of Connecticut—sat at the head of the table. She’d always been just as slim and tall as my mother, with reddish hair that fell in a perfect bob just above her shoulders. If anyone could pull off a bob, it was Grandma Kath.

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  We all sat around the dining room table—the one we used for special occasions, the one we used for my family’s first dinner with Adam. I disrupted the mound of peas on my plate, separating them one by one with my fork. I was working with the theory that if I scattered the contents of my dinner, maybe it would look like I ate more, and maybe, maybe I could shed the cute, but kind of chubby look.

  “So, Aubrey,” Cousin Peter said. The ice clinked in his glass as he placed it on the table. “Have you heard back from everywhere you applied?” I smiled a tight-lipped grin and nodded. “Good,” he said.

  “I think we’ve decided on Brown,” my mother said, turning her attention to Peter. “It was her reach school. Nobody thought she’d actually get in. She’ll be the first Ivy Leaguer in the family!” My mother cleared her throat. Cousin Peter’s ice clinked in his glass. I smiled a tight-lipped grin and nodded.

  I pushed the peas around on my plate until they disappeared under the mound of mashed potatoes.

  “It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Peter said. “College? You’re going to have the time of your life.”

  The time of my life. Sure. I took a breath, barely looking up from my plate, smiled a tight-lipped grin, nodded, and pushed up out of my chair.

  I’d spent the day before panicked when Karen conveniently announced that she’d made an appointment with a gynecologist the first week of May. I would be eighteen in a few months, and I needed to go before I left for college.

  Are you sexually active, Aubrey? I knew he or she or whatever this doctor was would ask.

  And what would I say? Yes, but only once, and no, he didn’t use a condom. No, I don’t know about his sexual history, I didn’t ask because I didn’t even know it was happening.

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  And then I had another vision of Dr. He-or-She examining me and saying, Aubrey, you are a virgin. You obviously made this whole thing up. You obviously were too drunk or too crazy. It’s obviously all in your head.

  I stood over the kitchen sink and turned the water up as hot as it would go, squeezing orange dish soap into my hands. The potatoes, peas, and gravy made a sort of gray paste and slid off the plate into the metal basin. I picked up a serving bowl, all covered in red crusty sauce, and I started to turn it over in my hands, under the hot faucet, the orange soapsuds filling up the basin. I stared hard as the red goo started to wash away and disappear beneath the sudsy bubbles. Steam rose from the sink, and my hands went kind of numb as I rubbed the bowl with my soapy thumb until it became white, so white that I could see just a glare of my reflection, and I remember thinking that I’d never seen anything so white before.

  Karen stood in the doorway.

  “Well, that was rude,” she said.

  “I have a migraine,” I said. I didn’t turn away from the sink. The steam rose up from the basin, the hot water still poured over me, numbing my hands. There was this sort of stale air between my mother and me—all stale and gray—like we were reading from a script to some black-and-white television show. The air felt thick—maybe it was the steam coming from the sink, but I knew I couldn’t stand up anymore. So I just turned, and let my body slide to the granite floor with my back to the oak cabinets.

  Karen ran frantically toward me and put her hand over my head, as if I’d spontaneously combusted with a blistering fever.

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  “I’m fine,” I said, pushing her away. “I just want to be alone. I can’t stand listening to that pretentious douche talk about the good old college days for another minute.”

  Karen’s face was all flushed, I noticed as she picked herself up away from me and fumbled around the kitchen, mumbling and slamming cabinet doors.

  “What is your problem?” she said. “You’ve been acting like a little bitch all week.” I shrugged, her words just swirling and swinging around me, tangling with all that steam, and my chest felt tight like no air could go through, no matter how hard I sucked in. “Aubrey,” she said, “answer me.”

  She stood over me, her hands on her hips. She was wearing lipstick, I noticed, Jungle Red, I thought it was called, and I just sat on the floor, my knees into my chest, sucking in hot, sink-steamy air, and I wanted to tell her to shut up, that she shouldn’t question me, that she should stop, stop, just stop, because she didn’t want to know the answer and she didn’t want to have that burden because it wouldn’t be easy, and I wouldn’t be easy, and I would never be easy again. I was a mess, a hot fucking mess with a gut-twisting anxiety that bred inside me, and she didn’t want to know about it. But instead I just sat quiet, still, numb, sucking in air, trying to fill that hollowed-out space inside of me.

  “Aubrey,” she said again, and this time I answered. I stood, and smashed the bowl into the granite, the white pieces of ceramic shattering at my mom’s feet, but she hardly flinched.

  I fell back to the ground, my face to my knees.

  “Please,” I mumbled. “Just leave me alone.” Hot tears stained my jeans.

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  “Aubrey,” she said.

  “For five fucking minutes, Mother. Just leave me alone for five fucking minutes.”

  DUSK WRAPPED ITSELF around the town. I slipped out the back door and onto the street. I couldn’t handle another question about where I was going to college in the fall and if I was excited. Because if they wanted my honest answer, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of this piece-of-shit town.

  I scraped my flats against the street. The sky bruised purple and gray. The college kids were still home for break, and I could feel him, clinging to me like cold, hard static. My skin prickled—pins and needles. I always wondered what caused that. But I decided it was when your body tries to distract you with prickly nerves—take your mind off the real pain. It’s your body’s way of cutting.

  I walked past houses adorned with Easter decorations in the windows and I thought of all the families, and what they were hiding and how much they probably actually hated one another.

  I took the back road so I wouldn’t have to pass his house, and crossed an unnecessary intersection as the cold cut into me like a dull blade.

  Cute, but kind of chubby.

  I stepped over sidewalk cracks. Excess cars lined the streets.

  I needed sleep. I needed to eat. I needed a cigarette.

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  I approached Adam’s house, and the town looked different. For a moment I thought I might actually be dead; I hoped for it, until I brushed up against a streetlamp, and the slightest spark reminded me that I was still alive.

  If Adam was still mad at me, I didn’t care. Let him be. I had nothing left to lose.

  His Jeep wasn’t in front of his house. It was only on the walk home that I saw i
t pulled over to the side on the back road—a road I just happened to take only to avoid passing Eric’s house with a front-window view of the Robbins family celebrating the resurrection of Christ.

  The engine was running. I pressed my face against the driver’s-side window. They didn’t see me.

  “YOU LOOK LIKE you just saw a ghost,” Eli said. I’d been walking, just walking. I had just seen Adam in his Jeep and I needed to walk somewhere, anywhere. Eli approached from behind, coming out of our street. He was alone.

  “It’s nothing. Just cold,” I said. The words felt unreal as they left my lips, like maybe they didn’t even really exist. “Did Mom send you out to find me?”

  He shrugged, put his hand on my shoulder. “I might have something for you,” he said.

  We sat, side by side, on the bleachers outside the high school. He lit the joint, spinning it between his lips. He pulled on it, his chest sinking while he inhaled. “Don’t let Karen get to you,” he said. “I’ve got her all figured out.”

  “It’s not about Mom,” I said, taking the joint from him, sucking it in. He looked so peaceful, still childlike and small.

  “Do you ever feel trapped?” I started, already regretting my choice of words.

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  “You mean physically, like at home?”

  “Well, yes and no. Not just in Seaport, but also in my life.” I touched my temple with two fingers and rubbed. “Sometimes I feel like my life is this perfect little arrangement, in like a snow globe. And it’s displayed up as someone else’s decoration. I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s Karen, maybe it’s just some mean little kid who got it as a gift from a weird aunt. But whoever’s snow globe it is, I feel like I’m just in it. And whenever they want, they can just pick it up and shake it, and watch the fake snow—what’s that made of?”

  “Plastic,” he said. “It used to be bone chips and porcelain.”