“Yeah,” she says. She sits back up, flushed and smiling. “He’s my costar, so it’s not like I’m going to date him. Okay, I’m totally going to date him. God. Why do I get myself in situations like these?” she says, her voice like fresh-squeezed orange juice, sweet and tart and totally organic. I feel the rest of the world evaporate, and all at once I’m a regular girl and we are regular friends. “Enough about me,” Janna says. “How’s it going with Eleanor?”
I groan. “Do you really want to know?”
She snorts. “Probably not.”
I tell her anyway.
Twenty-Two
I wake with a start the next evening, overcome with the distinct impression that I was disturbed by something, yet I don’t know what it was. I blink, slightly confused, as my eyes adjust to my reading light. Above me, the curtains dance in the current of the ceiling fan. A book is on my lap, still open, the words on the pages sloped away from me. My clock reads 11:00 p.m.
That’s when I hear a crashing sound.
Panicking, I jerk upright, swing my feet to the floor and creep across my room, skirting a squeaky floorboard as I reach into my closet to grab an umbrella. Holding it like a police baton, I ease open my door.
Across the hallway is the doorway to the spare room, a looming, shadowy rectangle. I swallow once.
Ignore it.
Turning resolutely away from it, I glance down the hallway. It’s empty.
I freeze, silent, waiting.
Another sound. It isn’t exactly a crash this time — more like a scuffling, coming from … outside? Both hands gripping the umbrella, I tiptoe down the hallway, tentatively parting the curtains and peering into the side yard. Nothing out of the ordinary. The light in the McAllisters’ garage is on. Owen is bent over a chunk of wood, carving away.
He must’ve just dropped something.
And I’m totally paranoid.
I collapse against the wall, grumbling under my breath. Back at the Marios’, there were sounds everywhere. They were part of the hum of the city, totally familiar. But in New Harbor, where it’s so quiet, a squirrel scurrying up a tree sounds like an assassin wading through the sawgrass with a hatchet.
I’ve just turned to go back to my room when I hear another scuffle-thump.
The front porch.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. Gripping the umbrella, I creep to the phone and dial 911. “Someone’s breaking into our house,” I hiss as soon as the operator answers. She asks me a couple of cursory questions — “Are you the only one home?” and “What’s your address?” and “What sort of sounds are you hearing?” — while I sidle to the front window and slowly pull a gap into the curtains. And there is —
Rusty.
Kissing Faith.
Actually, scratch that. He isn’t just kissing her. He’s sticking his tongue down her throat like he’s marooned on an island, and her tonsils are the only ship that will take him home. And she’s waving one arm around to the side, unbalanced, trying to get purchase of the railing so she doesn’t fall off the porch. Beside her feet is a plant, the pot shattered.
Striding to the door, I yank it open. “What the heck, you guys?” I basically yell. “You scared the crap out of me!”
Nothing. Not even a glance. Rusty and Faith are still swallowing each other’s faces. The operator, though — she speaks up: “Miss? Are you okay?”
“Sorry. It was my uncle, making out with his girlfriend,” I tell her, because False alarm doesn’t quite do it justice. Regardless, the operator is nice about it, since she works for New Harbor 911. If I dialed 911 in the city, only to tell the operator that my intruder was, in fact, my uncle sucking the face off his girlfriend, the operator would’ve probably sent an officer right over, just to tell me how stupid I was.
I apologize one last time and hang up, and that’s when Rusty and Faith come up for air. Rusty turns toward me and barks a laugh, adjusting his cockeyed hat. “Hey there, G,” he says, smiling widely, without even the good sense to look embarrassed. This is the first time I’ve spoken to Rusty in days. The first time since our power was turned off, actually. There’s no mention of this as he hoists up a screeching Faith and yeti-tromps over the threshold with her in his arms. “Holy shit, woman! What did you eat for dinner?” he asks with a snort, and then he just stops right there and looks at me.
“What?” I say.
“So we have some good news, kid.” He tips his head to the side a little, like he thinks I’m going to guess. When I don’t, he smiles like a lunatic and says, “We got married today.”
Well.
Faith squeals, grinning at me, easy and carefree. “It was totally spur of the moment! Can you believe it?”
I blink. I shift my weight. Finally a handful of words work their way up my throat. “Um. It’s actually” — I glance at Rusty — “yeah … pretty unbelievable.”
Let me just point out that Rusty has already been married five times. Six, if you count his annulment in the early nineties. His last marriage? It took place in Vegas, by way of a Cher impersonator.
Whom he hit on.
Rusty grins broadly at me, and then he plants a loud kiss on Faith’s forehead and carries her down the hallway.
I collapse on the couch. The sudden quiet in the living room leaves me feeling exhausted and wrung out — supernaturally heavy, like I might sink clear to Russia if I so much as exhale. It shouldn’t matter to me that Rusty is a complete child, and in some ways, it doesn’t. In some ways, it’s sort of endearing. One of the finest weapons in Rusty’s arsenal is his irresponsibility. But I’m not in the mood for irresponsibility. I’m not even in the mood for conversation, unless it involves an apology, and that clearly isn’t going to happen. Part of me wants to yell at him about it, but another part of me knows that yelling at Rusty would be a huge waste of time. And anyway, I don’t feel angry. My anger is still sleeping or it has been knocked out with ibuprofen and is sprawled out in a dark corner of the house, waiting for me to stumble over it. I’m too tired to be angry. Tired of waiting for Rusty to act like he cares. Tired of dodging the ghosts in this house.
Tired of avoiding that room.
The thought hits me sharp and fast, like a rubber band snapping against bare skin. I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, wishing I could stuff it back to wherever it came from.
Maybe I need a self-intervention.
Maybe if I were to walk into that room once a day or even a few times a week, I could be desensitized.
In a shining moment of idiocy, I jerk to my feet and struggle down the hallway, using trembling muscles that have not yet learned to walk. Not into that particular room, they haven’t. Not willingly. Not in the past couple of years. My legs shake and halt as I step into the room and slap on the light switch.
For a quick second, for a single gasp of time, I see it for what it is: just a room. Furniture and curtains. Throw rugs and lamps. But then my eyes slide toward the bed, across the familiar bumpy hexagonal patterns of the quilt, the dark blue pillows scattered against the headboard.
And I nearly go to my knees.
I’m crushed underneath a mass of darkness.
I’m going to be sick.
I’m unable to
I’m
Reeling backward, I scramble down the hallway and out the front door, bursting onto the porch and leaning over the railing, nauseated and gasping.
I can’t live like this.
Every time I walk down that hallway, every time I glance at that room, every time I see Owen, every time I breathe or walk or sleep or move, all I will ever think is: What really happened that night?
The evening is nearly silent, the only noise coming from Owen in the garage — a tap of chisel on wood, a shuffling of sneakers over sawdust.
What really happened that night?
Before I can second-guess myself
, I’m lurching off the porch, careening to the McAllisters’ garage, jerking to a stop in front of Owen and yelling, “Did you do it?!”
“Grace?” Owen is gaping at me. He’s wearing a Gators’ T-shirt and a frown, staring at me like he doesn’t recognize me.
I’m shaking almost too badly to stand. I clutch the workbench, trying to keep myself upright. “I need to know the truth, Owen. I need to know if it was you.”
His eyes are the deepest oceans of sadness. “Grace …”
“Owen. Did you?!”
He dips down to meet my gaze. He holds my stare. His expression is fierce. “I would never take advantage of you like that,” he says, and his honesty is everywhere, in the slopes of his eyebrows and in the earnest tilt to his mouth and in the green-green of his irises.
He’s innocent.
My mind gallops in circles, trying to reshuffle the facts of that night, trying to shift around the beliefs I’ve had all this time. Trying to switch everything: How I pinned the blame on Owen without even considering other options. How I didn’t give him the chance to explain.
How I was wrong.
I keep my voice steady, but it takes every bit of determination that I have. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”
Twenty-Three
We’re sitting at a table in Anthony’s, this kitschy little burger joint downtown. The place is tiny and too fluorescently lit for this time of night, but it’s clean, and it’s open till one in the morning. Owen drove us here in that Jeep I’ve seen in front of the McAllisters’. As he backed out of the driveway, I noticed that the steering wheel was covered in pink fur and a very tiny, very gaudy, very feathery stuffed pelican dangled from the rearview mirror. Owen saw me looking and grumbled, “I really need to get my own car.”
“Janna’s stuff, I take it?”
A nod for a reply, and then: “I think she figures that if she puts enough girly shit in here, I’ll be too embarrassed to drive it.” This sounded so over the top, so ridiculous, so Janna, that for the first time since I’d been back in New Harbor, I burst out laughing.
“Exactly,” Owen said as he slid to a creeping stop at the intersection of Ocean and Main, pausing longer than necessary before slowly accelerating. The cautious way he drove, the way his hands clamped down on the steering wheel — I could tell how much he hated it.
We didn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive. I knew that Owen was sorting things out in his mind before he spoke. That’s the way he operates. There are no empty words. Everything that comes out of his mouth has meaning, or else he doesn’t say it at all. It’s one of the things about him that I always loved.
Liked.
One of the things about him that I always liked.
And now, as we sit across from each other in a booth at Anthony’s, Owen is still silent. Only his fingers make noise as they tap the table. I busy myself by staring intensely at a table-sized advertisement for a burger — “A full pound of meat!” — beside his left elbow. The coffee aroma rising from my cup and our looming conversation has me slightly woozy. I push the cup around, just for something to do with my hands. Finally I glance up at him. Bad idea. He’s searching my face with those eyes.
They’re excruciating, those eyes.
They’re reaching into my chest, turning an invisible key. Opening something that needs to stay shut.
“Is that where you’re going to college?” I blurt, pointing to his T-shirt. “University of Florida?”
He nods once. “They have an amazing art program,” he says, and then he leans toward me. “Grace —”
“How’s everything at home?” I say.
He half smiles at me. “Fine. Everything’s fine.”
“I sense a but.”
Humoring me, he tells me that his dad has been busy getting the track team ready for a big summer tournament, and that his mom has been slammed at work, and that Janna has gone mental preparing for Grease. But all of his words seem so far away, like they’re muttered from across the room. Across the world.
And then he’s silent again. It isn’t an awkward silence. It’s the sort of silence that’s ready to implode. I don’t look at him. I can’t. I know exactly what he’s about to say. My heart thrums in my chest. I wipe my palms on my clothes. Don’t say it, Owen. Please don’t say it.
He leans toward me, ducking down and forcing me to look at him. “Grace?”
I meet his eyes and swallow.
“Someone raped you,” he whispers.
My heart feels as though it’s been stuffed full of rocks and then tossed into the ocean. It’s sinking, dragging my chest and lungs with it. I can’t breathe. I can’t move.
I’m drowning.
For the past couple of years, I’ve considered myself used or taken advantage of. But raped. That term — I can feel it physically. It thrashes in my stomach, harsh and barbed and relentless, clawing it to shreds.
Was I raped?
Yes.
Yes, I was.
But I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it now.
You’d think that twenty-two months would be enough time for me to sort through my feelings on the subject. But I’ve been so busy dealing with Dad’s death, so preoccupied by Rusty’s absence, so overcome with adjusting to life in the foster system, that my feelings about what happened on Labor Day weekend were packaged up and put away. Now that I’m finally facing them, they’ve grown too big to consider.
I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this.
At some point, I’ll have to be. But right now, everything is too raw and too abrasive. Right now, Owen is sitting across from me, waiting for me to speak.
I don’t, though. I just close my eyes and nod — yes, I was raped. With this confirmation comes rolling guilt and shame, like I made some sort of horrible tactical error that caused the rape, like I was an awful person for letting it happen, like confessing the truth is an admission of my own wrongdoing.
Like I’m so filthy I could scrub myself for days on end and still be dirty.
Deep down, I’m aware that I shouldn’t feel this way.
But I do.
I keep my eyes shut. I don’t want to see Owen’s expression. I keep waiting for him to bolt, like he has in the past when things got difficult, but when I open my eyes, he’s still there.
I blink at him for a moment.
He’s not the one who raped me.
I don’t know whether I’m supposed to feel relieved by this, but I am. Maybe there is still some hope left in the world. Maybe some things can be trusted.
I can’t help it: a tear skitters down my cheek.
Before, when I thought he’d done it, I was angry. At him, mostly, but also at myself, for trusting him so implicitly. Now, though, I don’t know what I feel. I think of all those voices in the living room that night. I don’t even know who was there, besides Dad and Rusty. Maybe the rest of them were strangers. Maybe the rest of them were friends. Familiar faces. I have no clue. All I know is that at some point after Owen left my room, one of them came in and —
I don’t realize how badly my hand is trembling until Owen reaches for it. Sucking in my breath, I flinch away. It’s an awful thing to do. I know this. But it’s a reflex. My distrust in him has been part of me for so long that it lives in my cells. I look away so I won’t have to see the hurt in his face, and then I whisper, “Who was there, Owen?”
Long pause.
His voice strained, Owen finally says, “A bunch of Rusty’s friends from work. Your dad and my dad. Andy and Sawyer came over when I was leaving. I guess they’d heard all the noise from next door and figured they’d join the party.”
“How many?” I croak. “How many all together?”
“Probably twenty-five people.”
Twenty-five people.
I clear my throat. I’m trying so hard not
to lose it right now. “Did anyone seem …?”
Did anyone seem like a rapist? Did anyone seem like the sort of person looking to annihilate my life? Did anyone seem like a monster?
“No,” Owen says in a sigh. “I mean, a bunch of the adults were pretty drunk, Rusty included.” He pauses for a beat, just looking at me. I can tell he’s waiting for me to tell him everything I remember about that night. He’s thinking about suspects. Timelines. Clues. But I’m not going there with him. Not right now. Maybe not ever.
We’re silent for several moments. I stare blankly at the blackness out the window, my frowning reflection blinking back at me.
“Grace,” Owen says, “what are you going to do?”
I sigh. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I can walk into a police station and just tell them.”
“Why not?”
I picture myself sitting in an interrogation room while some random cop asks me to give him all the details about what happened, while he asks me why I didn’t come forward sooner. I think about how humiliating it would be to recount it all, to tell the police everything. “It was almost two years ago,” I say.
I don’t add that there was physical evidence.
I don’t add that I was bleeding, or that I had stabbing pain for days.
I don’t add that there was mental damage, and it’s still tracking its dirty feet all over my life.
Owen leans toward me and whispers, “Grace, I know this is probably painful to consider, but your uncle —” He stops and draws in a breath, and then begins again. “You blacked out at his house. His strange behavior after your dad died, his absence from your life the past couple years … it could’ve been guilt. He might’ve —”
“No. Rusty is — no. He’s not a rapist. He’s a screwup, yes. But not a rapist.” Owen stares at me, unconvinced, as I go on. “And neither was my dad. Or your dad. Or Andy or Sawyer, for that matter.”
Owen leans toward me. “But Sawyer. He’s —”
“A complete ass, but rape isn’t his style. Which leaves Rusty’s work buddies. Did you … recognize any of them that night?”
The Leading Edge of Now Page 10
