Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  The idea descended upon her with all the gentleness of a loon gliding onto a lake. The idea came, and hard upon it came doubts and fears—that it was too difficult, required too many sacrifices, and couldn’t be done without destroying everything she’d been fighting so hard to keep—but what had she been fighting to keep, really? Maybe Camp Kwenback was just the physical manifestation of a perfect childhood, of perfect families, of a perfect life. Maybe she’d clung too long to her husband’s vision of the same. Maybe what she should have been doing all along was to stop trying to fix someone else’s broken nest and instead have the courage to create a new one of her own.

  “Sadie.”

  Sadie looked up at the sound of her voice, all wide green eyes, and Riley’s heart rose to her throat. There was this thing about choices. You think the hardest part is making one—taking the wavering temperature of your heart, weighing the pros and cons, choosing to destroy old dreams in order to build new ones—but you’d be wrong. Making a choice was only the first step.

  Sometimes it was the easiest.

  “If you decide you don’t want to live here,” Riley said, as she put her hands on Sadie’s shoulders, “then come and live with me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Tess recognized her rapist right away.

  Standing behind the one-way glass staring at her attacker, Tess felt an odd vertigo along with a tingling in her fingers. She smelled a phantom scent, diesel and old beer and something fermenting. Then she heard a shuffle of footsteps and sensed someone coming to stand directly behind her. Rodriguez. His unexpected presence at this lineup gave her something solid to focus on as the five men in the next room turned as a group to show their profiles.

  Nearly sixteen years had passed since that monster had busted through the door to her childhood bedroom. She had shoved that memory in a box in the attic of her mind, in the hope that someday, maybe, she’d stumble upon it with a sense of surprise that such a terrible thing had ever happened to her. She’d shoved the memory so deep that when she’d walked into this Albany police station to identify him, she’d nursed a growing fear that she’d distorted the memory so much that the monster she remembered no longer bore the faintest resemblance to the man he really was.

  But that wasn’t true.

  He was the third one who swaggered in. The gray T-shirt he wore was a size too small, stretched across the pot of his belly. The ravages of alcohol had broken so many capillaries that his nose was beet red, malformed. He’d been in a few more bar fights since she’d last seen him, but he still had the chain-link neck tattoo, the split in his earlobe, the crescent scar gleaming white on his temple.

  He looked brutish, stupid, and angry.

  “Number three,” she said.

  “Look carefully.” Jolie Sanderson, the assistant district attorney, spoke from the shadows. “Be absolutely sure.”

  “Number three.”

  The attorney stepped up and rapped on the glass. The guard on the other side led the men back out, shuffling single file. Tess watched the back of her rapist’s balding head, probing her emotional temperature, trying to figure out what she felt—triumph or pity or fury or something. The prisoner now trudging out of the room was a stranger who’d done her terrible violence, but right now Tess just felt numb.

  The district attorney flicked on the lights and turned toward the public defender with a slow smile. The public defender, sandwich in hand, shrugged and licked mustard off his fingers.

  “Ms. Hendrick.” Jolie pushed the door open and gestured for her to step into the hall. “Why don’t you wait out here while I talk to the accused’s attorney? I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  Tess wandered into the hall and stopped in the middle. Blue uniforms passed her by on either side and she resisted the urge to flinch. She’d always felt vulnerable since that terrible night. She’d spent so many years carrying a knife in her boot. She owned mace. She’d push a set of dresser drawers in front of her door whenever she rented a trailer at a man camp because she knew too well what could happen if she didn’t. She felt dizzy because she’d braced herself to see the bastard who had made her like this—and now it was over.

  She strained to hear Jolie’s voice beyond the door, but all she heard was mumbling. Then she noticed Rodriguez leaning against the wall.

  “You had the same look on your face,” he said, “twenty-odd years ago, when I found weed in your pocket and threatened to charge you with possession.”

  “Scorn?”

  “Shock.”

  Tess took the blow. Yes, she supposed she was in shock. So much had happened so fast, with Sadie…and now this.

  “You were so skinny,” Rodriguez said. “Hungry and young and scared and not street-hardened enough to hide it.”

  She turned her mind away from the image he’d projected of her, one she didn’t like to think about. She waved toward the door where the attorneys were negotiating the future of her rapist. “I’m not used to putting control of my life in other people’s hands.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, Hendrick.”

  “And it’s not just my life she’s holding in there. It’s Sadie’s, too.” Tess remembered the photo in his office. “Do you ever stop worrying about your kids?”

  “Nope. And I’ve got one going to college in the fall.”

  Tess looked down at her feet, figuring if she concentrated on them long enough, she would finally feel like she was standing in place and not weaving like a drunk. She swallowed. “What if—”

  “Jolie will drive a hard bargain,” he said. “I called her in for this because she’s handled more cases of sexual assault than any other assistant DA in the state. She knows this system inside and out.”

  “I want Sadie to be safe.”

  “I suspect what you want is for Sadie to have a life very different from yours.”

  She closed her hands into fists, tight enough to feel her fingernails dig into her skin.

  “Hell, I didn’t want you to have a life like yours, Tess.” He squinted toward the light pouring through the windows down at the end of the hall. “Maybe if I’d had the sense to intervene when I brought you home to that mother of yours the first time, I could have saved you all of this.”

  Tess’s eyes hurt. In her vision, Rodriguez washed out to a big, burly blue streak. Then Jolie saved her from weepy embarrassment by bustling out of the room while shoving a file into her overstuffed leather shoulder bag.

  The attorney strode right up to Tess and put a hand on her shoulder. “It doesn’t look good, Ms. Hendrick.”

  Tess’s heart dropped.

  “The public defender rejected the plea out of hand,” the attorney said. “He said his client wouldn’t accept it.”

  Rodriguez stepped in. “I warned you no felon would cop to a second felony.”

  “I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t try.” Jolie motioned for them to follow her as she strode with purpose down the hall. “Like I told you over the phone, if you positively identified the man who assaulted you, I would try a plea deal first and I would come in hard. But he didn’t bite, which means we have to talk strategy.”

  Tess felt the first crack in the numb shell around her. The long, narrow hall echoed with murmurs, the swift rustling of hurried people, the clicking of high-heeled shoes, and the kind of muffled hum that she’d always associated with casinos and courtrooms—both places where the house always won.

  “Explain this to me,” she said, dropping back to match Rodriguez’s stride.

  “He’s got one felony charge already.” Rodriguez spoke too low for passersby to hear. “If he pleads to a second, he’s looking at hard time. Since he’s in jail now, he’s got nothing to lose if he fights.”

  “This will do.” Jolie pulled open a heavy door with a diamond-shaped window. Inside were a metal desk and three metal chairs.

  Tess’s stomach lurched. It looked like an interrogation room.

  “We’ll have some privacy in here
to talk,” Jolie said, slapping her bag on the desk and pulling out a pile of files. “My understanding, according to Officer Rodriguez, is that your first concern is for your daughter?”

  “Yes.” Tess sank into the chair, felt the metal steal the warmth from her thighs.

  “I admit that concerns me as well.” The DA spread out her files and chose one to open. “It took some convincing to get Officer Rodriguez to come clean to me that the child in question was a result of the assault.”

  Tess’s throat tightened.

  “I feel obliged to tell you, Ms. Hendrick, that in this state there are no provisions in the law that would prevent a rapist from demanding access, custody, even contact with any children born of rape.”

  That old fear, like ice water down her back. “It’s the same in Ohio where she was born.”

  “Unfortunately that’s a legislative issue. One that should be addressed in our lifetimes, but right now it’s beyond our immediate abilities to change—”

  “The bastard doesn’t know about Sadie.” Tess met Jolie’s sharp gaze. “And I’m here today on the assumption that you’ll guarantee he never will.”

  “He won’t hear it from me, from my office, or from any of my officers,” Jolie said, tapping the metal table with one painted fingernail. “I can assure you of that. But you should understand that whether he finds out depends largely on how hard he fights any charges we bring against him, as well as his resources—which I can only assume are slim since he has been assigned counsel by the court.”

  “You’re telling me,” Tess said, through an ever-narrowing throat, “that you can’t give me any guarantees.”

  “Justice is often an unintended side effect of our criminal justice system, Ms. Hendrick. I can promise nothing but my very best effort.”

  Tess’s blood went cold. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Rodriguez’s face, the skin around his mouth pulled tight.

  “First fill me in on some facts,” the attorney said, drawing Tess’s attention back to the matter at hand. “Your daughter is not in your legal custody, is she?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, when you made your adoption plan, you surrendered all parental rights, am I correct?”

  She nodded, the words like a slap.

  “And because the biological father could not be found at the time of the child’s birth,” Jolie continued, “despite Officer Rodriguez’s exceptional detective work”—she fanned the papers in the file—“the accused’s parental rights were thus surrendered by default.”

  Tess said, “That can’t be undone. Right?”

  “Answer the question, Ms. Hendrick.”

  The attorney had an eye that skewered you right to the back wall. So Tess thought very carefully about those months after she’d discovered she was pregnant. The agency’s legally worded questions about the birth father were easily satisfied when she’d admitted that she’d been raped by a stranger. They’d asked her about the father again, in those thirty-six hours after Sadie’s birth, amid a blur of unexpected emotion and confusion and indecision, so nervous they’d been about whether the father would show up at some future date to challenge custody. He won’t, she’d told them. So she’d given Sadie up and then disappeared into the world, just to make sure of it.

  “Yes,” she said. “That was my understanding.”

  “Good.” Ms. Sanderson picked up a pencil on the desk and tapped it to get Rodriguez’s attention. “Even if the accused found out—even if he could afford to fight to have the adoption plan made null and void fifteen years after, he’d be looking at years of battles ahead of him trying to convince a court the parental rights custody limitations should be overturned for a man convicted of sexual assault.” The attorney turned her gaze on Tess again. “You protected your Sadie well.”

  Tess blinked at the disorienting sensation of having an authority figure in a tailored white shirt telling her she was right.

  “I understand,” the attorney asked, “that you’ve had some recent contact with your—with Sadie.”

  “She came looking for me.”

  “Any chance there’ll be a change in the custody situation?”

  Tess gripped the ends of the armrests. She told herself Sadie deserved what she’d had before—a nice house in a quiet suburb full of at-home mothers—someplace rural like the Ohio farm town she and her adoptive aunt lived in. “No,” she said, “no, Sadie will be staying with her adoptive aunt.” No reason to muddy the waters with the possibility of Riley’s offer.

  “Very well.” The attorney slipped on her glasses to write something down. “And how old is Sadie now?”

  “She’ll be fifteen in a month.” The date of her birth approached like a rising ache.

  “Three more years and she’ll no longer be a minor.” The attorney nodded. “We can do this. We can protect her until she’s eighteen.”

  “I don’t want her to be protected just until she’s eighteen. I want her to be protected for good.”

  Rodriguez said, “Kids grow up and go away from you, Tess, whether they’re in your custody or not. At eighteen they become their own legal entities, with the right to do what they want.”

  “Ms. Hendrick,” Ms. Sanderson added, “it’s just a legal definition, and the limits of our—”

  “I’m not interested in limits. I’m interested in keeping that bastard away from Sadie for as long as I possibly can.”

  “Then we’ll have to keep him in jail, won’t we?”

  Tess sat back. The hard slats of the chair dug furrows along her spine.

  “The way I see it,” Jolie said, pushing herself close to the desk and the papers splayed over it, “we’ve got strong physical evidence. Both in the DNA sample Officer Rodriguez had tested from your rape kit—which, by the way,” she said, glancing at him over the rim of her glasses, “will be contested, considering the age of the sample. But we also have the physical evidence from your hospital records, which will confirm injuries consistent with a violent sexual assault.”

  The attorney was holding up a piece of paper. Through the translucency of the fibers, Tess could see the familiar medical form, the list of her injuries, the typed-up doctor’s comment. Black spots were starting to swarm in front of her eyes so she roped her fingers together and pressed them against her diaphragm to force herself to take deep, slow breaths.

  “It’s unfortunate but not surprising,” Ms. Sanderson said, “that there are no material witnesses—”

  “No cooperative ones,” Rodriguez interrupted.

  “—but these two pieces of physical evidence, plus the testimony of Officer Rodriguez when he first interviewed you in the hospital, make up a strong case. This is the kind of sexual assault case that I don’t need to be convinced to take to trial.”

  Tess heard a quick rat-tat-tat sound and realized that she’d skip-jumped her own chair against the floor. “A trial?”

  “It’s rare,” Ms. Sanderson said. “Only about five percent of the sexual assault cases that pass my desk ever go to—”

  “But I’ve got a juvenile record.”

  “Long expunged.”

  Tess turned to Rodriguez, saw him shrug, saw the strangest twitch at the corner of his lips. Her mind couldn’t keep up with the implications so she turned back to what preoccupied her, to what was, even now, making a migraine throb behind her right eye.

  “What if during a trial”—the word thick in her mouth—“his lawyer asks me if I had a child?”

  “I’d object under relevance.”

  “But then he’ll know.”

  “It may not come to that. Bear with me, Ms. Hendrick. When I say I don’t have to be convinced to take this to trial, what I’m really saying is that it’s a strong case. If we win, he’ll get some real time.”

  Rodriguez interjected, “How much more time?”

  “Depends on the judge. He’ll get a minimum five, maximum twenty-five for a Class B felony rape. An extra ten years for being a violent second offender. But if I threaten h
im with first degree rape,” Sanderson retorted, “plus the charge of predatory sexual assault, plus being a second violent offender, he’s looking at a hard dozen years at least if he tries to fight it against this evidence. I can’t guarantee the outcome of any trial, but if I were a betting woman, I’d say he’d lose it.”

  Tess calculated swiftly. “Only a dozen years?”

  “Absolute minimum.” The attorney tossed her pen on the desk. “There is one thing I need to know, though, before I proceed in any direction. Officer Rodriguez tells me that you are a determined woman, but rape cases are difficult. I don’t think I have to tell you that the trial is often a devastating moment of exposure for the victim. You’ll have to sit up in the witness stand and tell us everything that happened that night. What you were wearing, whether you were drinking, if you’d taken any drugs, how many boyfriends you had. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed strong women drop charges long before trial, or back off at the last minute.”

  A rivulet of sweat slid down her spine. A weakness spread through her, and she pressed her thighs together against a sudden urge to pee. They were looking at her, waiting for a response, waiting for her to tell them with confidence that she’d testify. But she kept imagining sitting in that courtroom talking to a crowd of people—some of whom she knew, many who knew her—about how he’d tied her wrists to her bedposts and did whatever he wanted, all while the rapist himself sat at the defense table, listening to it all, maybe even grinning.

  She felt pressure on her arm and looked down to see Rodriguez’s hand. She glanced up and found herself staring at the spot on the back of his head where his dark hair whorled, because his head was in his other hand, because he was gripping his brow as if he understood the price she’d have to pay.

  And it came to her then, like a veil peeled from her vision. All of Rodriguez’s gruffness, his angry speeches, his constant harassment, and all the frustration he’d expressed, may have been more than mean-spirited persecution from a cop who despised her. Because right now his concern for her burrowed so deep she felt it warm her heart.