“The image, the visual memory, is of a man standing above her. The guy is wearing a cap of some kind. She said it was a light-colored cap with a pattern. Flat on top. And it was tight. Not like a ski cap. Because she remembers being on the chair, the ‘above her’ part of the image confuses her. She thought she might have slouched down in the chair she was on. Or she may have been on a different piece of furniture in the house and she just doesn’t remember moving. She even mentioned it’s possible that a man was standing on the arms of the chair. She’s not sure. She doesn’t know how the man in the image could have been so ‘above’ her.”
I was confused. “It was the same man? The man who gave her the port?”
Hella’s expression made it clear to me that her patient was having trouble with that detail as well. “I asked her that. She’s sure it was her host. But she doesn’t actually remember that it was him.”
She waited to see if, or how, I would react. I was in therapist mode. I kept my reaction to myself. Plenty of research has demonstrated that eyewitnesses often fill in blank spaces in their memories. They just do.
Hella said, “But the image she describes is of a man standing above her, with the cap thing. That’s clear in her memory. She’s adamant about it, that she didn’t imagine it.”
Hella, I sensed, was expecting me to disbelieve her. Or challenge her. At face value, that made no sense. Hella knew the story she was telling; I didn’t. Which suggested to me that at some point in the narrative, Hella’s patient had expected the same—she’d expected not to be believed by Hella. I filed it.
Hella continued. “She says that the man who was hovering above her had pulled down the front of his pants. The pants had an elastic waistband. He pulled them down, and he’d pulled his genitals out over the waistband so that the elastic went back behind his scrotum—actually, behind . . . everything. So, his genitals, everything, were completely exposed. Above her.”
Hella looked at me. “And, she says, he had an erection. When he was standing over her.”
I did my best not to react.
“She remembers that the man was talking to her. While he was there, above her. Always talking, never stopping. In this monotone-like, calm voice. She called it ‘hypnotic.’ She remembers thinking it all felt surreal to her. Artificial is the word she used. He kept repeating her name, over and over and over. Other things, too, but she doesn’t remember the other words he was saying.”
“Any affective memory?” I asked. “For her?”
“I asked her the same thing. She said she felt ‘separate’—as though it wasn’t really happening to her. Dissociated, I guess. She says that she was there and she wasn’t there, she was in the room with the man and she wasn’t. She remembers trying to move her arms and having the sensation that they weren’t even attached to her body.
“She isn’t sure what room it was, whether they were still by the fireplace when all this happened. She says that she remembers at one point having a thought that they weren’t alone, that someone else had to be hearing everything. What was going on. How embarrassing it was going to be that his pants were down and that he had an erection.
“She was afraid of being, I don’t know, embarrassed. Of getting caught with him. She said that.”
I said, “She remembers a fear of being discovered?” That was a far cry from hoping to be discovered and rescued.
“Yes,” Hella said.
I got the impression that Hella didn’t see the same disconnect that I was seeing in her patient’s story. I wondered what that meant. And I wondered about the quality of her patient’s recollections. What part of the story was memory and what was confabulation.
“And she says that was the last thing she remembered. At that point. Until the next morning.”
“God,” I said.
HELLA LOOKED BEAT UP. Physically depleted.
She stood in front of the sofa. She stretched her neck, raising her chin so that her eyes faced toward the ceiling for a few seconds. “This is exhausting,” she said. “For me, right now. This is the first time I’ve done this, told this story to anyone. It is so hard for me to say it out loud, to you, right now, that it helps me understand how hard it is for her to be living with what happened to her.”
There were lots of things I could have said right then. I chose to say nothing at all. Some of what I might have said might have been soothing to Hella. Some of it would have offered her an opportunity to get some distance from her patient’s experience. Most all of it would have gotten in the way of the work she and I needed to do. And that would be the most serious supervisory sin.
Hella sat back down. This time, her legs were out to one side, not curled beneath her. The nails on her big toes were painted a starkly different shade than the nails on the other toes. The big toes were a medium pink. The little toes were all dark burgundy.
She sipped some more water. “She woke the next morning at six twenty or so. There was a clock on a table by the bed, that’s how she knew.
“She says she tried to remember what time she’d gone to bed, to figure how long she’d been asleep. But she couldn’t do the arithmetic. It wasn’t that she couldn’t remember what time she went to bed, it was that the simple arithmetic was stumping her. She couldn’t figure out how many hours were between eleven thirty or whatever and six twenty. That’s how disoriented she was feeling when she woke up.
“The surroundings puzzled her initially, too. The room, the bed, the linens, the pajamas she was wearing, everything. The smells.
“She stressed how foreign the room smelled to her. Not bad, not noxious, just not familiar. She said that for a second, she was even thinking she was waking in the hospital. I’m not sure what that means, or if it’s important, but when she woke up she was acutely aware of the way everything smelled.”
Hella looked at me. She was giving me a chance to add some commentary. I didn’t. I waited. She recognized that I was waiting. “She said it took her a minute or two to create a context that would explain where she was. The big party, the drafting tables, the drinking, the staying over. She said until she got there—until she figured it all out—she felt frightened. Her heart had started racing. She was panicky. She said everything felt dangerous to her until she remembered why she was there.
“She initially thought that she was feeling so frightened because of the disorientation, because she didn’t know where she was. Not—at least not right away—because of anything that had happened to her. She didn’t yet have any memory of what had happened to her.” Hella looked me in the eyes. “Does that make sense?”
“Does it to you?” I said.
Hella nodded. “Completely. I don’t think I buy that most of her fear was because of the disorientation of waking up and feeling lost, Alan. We’ve all done that. It’s not that foreign of a sensation. The where-am-I panic goes away pretty quickly. I think, even if she didn’t know it consciously, she still must have had a sense that she’d been violated the night before. That’s what she was reacting to emotionally—that’s why she was so frightened. It wasn’t just the disorientation.
“The fear she was experiencing must have been awful, I think. Those first few minutes? She was disoriented, sure, but she had just been raped, right? She had to be trying to find a way to make sense of all that, even without conscious awareness or memory. How she was feeling? I can only . . . imagine.”
“Okay,” I said. The simple word was intended to reduce friction.
Hella went on. “Right away, she said, when she figured out where she was, she wanted to go home. Just get out to her car and go home. Her purse was on the bedside table. She grabbed it to make certain her car keys and her phone were there. That’s all she wanted to know. That she had her phone and she had a way home.
“She grabbed the phone to check for messages. But it wasn’t turned on. She immediately thought the phone battery must have died for some reason, because she never turns it off when she’s away from home. Never. She made a big, big point of that.
&n
bsp; “She hit the power switch and the phone started to come on, right away. It powered right up. The battery was fine. She said she immediately thought, Someone turned my phone off.”
“Right away?” I asked. “Her first explanation was that someone must have turned off her phone?”
“Yes,” Hella said. “That was it. She said she tried to remember something from the night before that would explain it any other way. A conversation with someone about the phone. A problem with the phone. Some reason that she might have agreed to turn it off overnight. She couldn’t remember talking about it, or thinking about it, with anyone. So she was sure that someone had gone into her purse—that’s where she keeps it��and turned her phone off. Because she knows she wouldn’t have done it. That freaked her out.”
Hella filled her cheeks with air, and she sighed. She said, “And there’s more.”
In my business, there usually is.
16
“When she got the phone powered back up, it was set to vibrate, not to ring. She maintains she doesn���t do that. Because she keeps it in her bag, she missed calls when it would vibrate. She said she’s the one who’s always embarrassed when her phone rings at the wrong time. At a movie, in church.”
I wanted to be sure I understood. “Someone switched her phone to vibrate, and then someone turned it off? That was her conclusion?”
“Right.”
“But that person left the phone in her purse? She could have turned it back on at any time? Does that make sense to you?” I asked.
Hella said, “Someone did not want her phone to ring.”
Hella’s reply lacked any confidence. I said, “Okay. Someone did not want her phone to ring. Keep going. Why?”
Hella exhaled audibly before she said, “He—her host—didn’t want to be interrupted while he . . .” She raised her eyebrows. “Raped her.”
I said, “Or whoever raped her didn’t want anything to interrupt her sedation after he raped her. Or both. I’m thinking either, or both.”
“I didn’t think about that, Alan.” Hella involuntarily tightened the muscles in her jaws. I could see tendons twitching at her temples. She pulled her painted toes under the tent of her skirt and tucked the fabric beneath her feet. “After she checked messages—there weren’t any—she says she listened for sounds in the house, indications that anyone else was already awake upstairs, or maybe even out in the kitchen. She told me she said a silent prayer that she was the first one up. She wanted to get dressed and get out to her car without seeing anyone.
“She got off the bed to change into her clothes. And immediately, she had to catch herself. She was dizzy. She grabbed on to something, a chair, to steady herself. When she was finally able to stand up straight holding on to the chair, the dizziness passed, at least momentarily. But she said that standing there she became aware that the pajamas she was wearing felt funny. The bottoms felt, you know, wrong. She tried to straighten them with one hand while she held on with the other. She was thinking they’d gotten twisted during the night. But when she looked they were on her straight, that wasn’t the problem.
“That’s when she remembered that when she put them on the night before, she thought they were too small. That must be it, right? she told herself. Why they feel so funny. They’re the wrong size. No big deal. She started to take them off to get dressed to go home. She took off the bottoms first. As she pushed them down off her waist, you know, leaning over so she could step out of them, she saw the tag. On the waistband. But the tag was in the front, not in the back.
“She knew she wasn’t thinking clearly, but she also knew that wasn’t right. That the tag shouldn’t be in front. And she thought, of course, That’s why the pajamas feel funny. But seeing the tag in front also caused her to remember that she had written down the brand of the pajamas the night before. It was like each little fragment of memory, each clue about things that happened the night before, gave her another little fragment of memory that she could use to connect to the next one.
“She’d written down the brand because she liked the pajamas. Wanted to see if she could find a pair in a store. But to do it, to find the tag, she’d had to unbutton the whole top and take it off so she could see the tag that was sewn into the neckline. She was sure she would have been able to tell if she’d actually put on the bottoms backward, with the tag in the front. If she had, she could have just looked down to read the tag or, had she noticed the bottoms were on backward, read the tag as she took them off to turn them around.” Hella took a deep breath. “I think I am making that sound more complicated than it really was. Her conclusions make sense to me, Alan. Am I thinking about all this correctly?”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“Anyway, she’s puzzled by all of it. She knows it doesn’t add up right. She can’t figure out why she slept with her pajamas on backward. At that point, she isn’t considering any . . . alternative explanation.
“And she’s still puzzled about what happened with her phone. Altogether, she’s feeling disoriented, she’s still woozy, and now, with the phone thing, and the balance thing, and the pajama thing, she’s thinking that she may still be a little drunk, or maybe a lot hungover.
“She spots the robe and remembers putting it on to go sit by the fire the night before. It’s tossed on the end of the bed, not hung on its hanger on the back of the door. She says that’s not like her—not to have hung it back up. She told me she’s one of those guests who puts everything away, leaves everything clean and neat.
“More pieces of memory start returning. The robe caused her to remember her host knocking on the door and his insistent invitation for another drink.
“And then she remembered sitting by the fire with . . . her host . . . him . . . and the drink he gave her. She describes a dark liquid, a small wineglass; she wouldn’t remember it was port until later. She remembers his wife never coming back downstairs. She tried to remember how much she’d had to drink. At that point she was thinking one little glass, or two.
“She maintains that none of it is like her. She drinks socially, wine with dinner, a margarita with a friend, a beer after golf, that sort of thing, but she’s not a big drinker. She says she can’t recall the last time she was really drunk. She said it was probably just after college, during the first few years of her marriage.”
“Does that coincide with what you know about her?” I asked. “Her drinking habits?”
“Yes, absolutely. She has some relationship issues, Alan. Self-esteem problems, sure. She’s half-lost, remember? But substances aren’t one of her problems. She’s not a big drinker.
“So then she takes off the pajama top, sees her bra where she left it—it’s on a chair by the bed. She pulls it on, and she reaches for her underwear, which she’d placed beneath the skirt she wore to the party. The skirt was nicely folded on the same chair, just the way she thought she would have left it. Her panties were where she left them.
“But before she could put the underwear on, she gasped, and she froze. She held her breath. Her mouth hung open and she thought, No! Then, NO, NO, NO!
“She said, ‘No.’ Out loud. She was actually afraid she’d said it too loudly. She covered her mouth. She said that’s when she knew.”
My breathing grew shallow.
“Alan, she’s really clear about all this, the details of getting dressed that morning. There was no doubt in her voice when she told me this part of the story.
“She stood up. She still hadn’t touched the panties. She was standing in front of that chair near the bed. Her feet were about a foot apart. And she reached down with her left hand—she’s left-handed—and she touched her vagina. She felt herself. Slowly. Carefully. She started to cry, she said. Her eyes just completely filled with tears. She could feel her chin quivering. She said, ‘I was crying like a little girl.’
“She says that at that moment she was completely sure that somehow, some way, she’d had sex the night before. Intercourse. And that she didn’t remember an
y of it happening. At all.”
I was hesitant to interrupt, but I couldn’t make sense of the story as Hella was telling it. I tried for a clarification. “The rapist didn’t use a condom? He ejaculated inside of her? And she felt the presence of semen the next morning?”
“No. Not exactly.”
I waited. Hella’s discomfort seemed to redouble. “What exactly?” I asked. “What were the sensations she felt with her fingers that indicated she’d had . . . intercourse—that she’d been raped, vaginally—the night before?”
Hella said, “She could just tell. She said she tried to remember what had happened. Desperately. Any detail. Anything about it. At first, she couldn’t find a trace of it in her awareness. Nothing.
“Her breathing sped up like she was hyperventilating and she started feeling woozy again. She stepped backward and she lowered herself down to sit on the edge of the bed. To try to steady herself.” Hella’s face blossomed into an expression of deep compassion. “She missed the edge of the bed, Alan. She misjudged the edge when she was sitting, and she barely grazed the mattress as she fell down hard. She ended up banging her spine against the sideboard of the bed frame and then she fell even harder still against the floor.
“She sat there on the floor, where she fell, she said, for a few minutes. She was weeping. She was hurting from the fall. She was desperately trying to remember what had occurred the night before.
“The fact that she’d had sex and that she didn’t remember it? She couldn’t quite believe that could really happen. And her wooziness was really concerning her, especially after she fell trying to sit down. But she couldn’t recall anything at all that helped her make any sense of it, and that was terrifying to her. She had no memories of sex. Of being romantic with anyone. Of being intimate with anyone. Of being forced. Of being hurt. No good sex, no bad sex. No rape, no assault on her that included sex.
“Just this absolute certainty that she’d had intercourse the night before.”
In a neutral voice, I asked, “Do you understand that certainty, Hella?”
The Last Lie Page 13
