by J W Becton
“Pecan,” she confirmed, swatting me on the backside. “Now get on out of here and sit with your sister.”
Before pushing open the door, I took a deep breath.
I wanted Tricia to take my news well, so harnessing my fear of driving her back to drinking, I returned to the table and sat across from my sister.
“Tricia,” I said, trying to keep the hesitancy from my voice, “I wanted to talk to you alone for a minute.”
God, it sounded like I was about to tell her she had cancer.
So much for a light tone.
Obviously, Tricia knew something was up because when I made eye contact with her, her eyes were narrow, suspicious. She shook her head as if to ward off what she suspected might be coming, and a knife twisted in my gut.
“Okay,” she said, her tone wary and her head still shaking in the negative.
“I know the last month has been rough for you,” I began. “Your ankle and rehab and all.”
She nodded.
“And you have come so far. I’m so happy to have you back. It’s like old times,” I said.
Tricia attempted a smile, but something more than her skepticism seemed to cloud her eyes, and I wasn’t sure exactly what.
“I don’t like to think about old times,” Tricia said, misunderstanding my meaning. “The past is over. I’ve moved on.”
“I know the past is over, but after what happened to you,” I said, being careful not to use the word “rape,” “I just want you to have some closure. For us all to have some closure.”
“I know you do,” Tricia said, becoming serious and finally meeting my eyes. “I know you and Mom and Daddy were hurt too by…what happened, and I’m sorry for that.”
I took a deep breath.
“No,” I said, “Don’t be sorry. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah,” she said, sighing, “I know it wasn’t.”
“It was his fault. The man who….”
I didn’t want to say the words, and my voice trailed off. I looked away, staring at the table beneath my hands for long moments.
Finally, I said, “That’s why I’ve been searching for him, Tricia, the man who did that to you. So you won’t be trapped in the past.”
My hands shook, and I ventured a quick glance at her. She sat totally frozen, her lips pressed into so firm a line that they had almost disappeared.
Finally, she said, “You found him.”
“Well, yeah,” I said gently, “maybe. A suspect whose fingerprint matches the one in your file has been arrested on an unrelated charge.”
I forced myself to look at Tricia openly now. Her face gave no reaction.
“The DNA tests take weeks, though, so it’s not for sure yet,” I added, feeling that might somehow soften the blow.
My sister didn’t speak, move, or blink. She hardly seemed to breathe.
“Tricia?” I whispered, reaching out to touch her hand on the table with my shaking fingers. “Are you okay?”
Her eyes remained resolutely forward, unfocused, and her face had gone pale and bloodless. Slowly, she slipped her hand from beneath mine, and my chest seemed to implode as if a black hole had replaced my heart. Her gesture told me everything. It may not happen all at once, but my sister was going to slip away from me.
Torn between regret at having told her, fear at potentially driving her back to alcoholism, and anger that I would suffer for doing the right thing by bringing a destructive criminal to justice, I began to speak again. I hoped that something I would say might magically make matters better, though I knew without a doubt that such a thing was impossible.
“I know it’s a surprise, but I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. I’ve been trying for seventeen years to find a way to help you, and I thought this was it. I….”
My voice trailed off as Tricia’s gaze snapped to mine, suddenly seeing me. Her eyes were luminous with restrained tears.
“No,” Tricia whispered. “Stop.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
And I was sorry and not sorry all at the same time.
“I didn’t do this to hurt you,” I said. “You have to believe me. I did it to hurt him.”
Tricia spoke, but I couldn’t understand her mumbled words. “Don’t say you’re sorry,” she repeated, her voice now audible but strangely flat and unemotional. “And don’t bother explaining. I get it.”
“Okay,” I said, unsure of how to respond. I knew we were on shaky ground, and I was afraid to take another step for fear that the earth would drop away beneath my feet.
“I knew this would happen one day,” she said, her head dropping low. “I hoped it wouldn’t, but deep down, I knew it would. Even though you never said, I knew you were looking.”
“You knew?” I asked.
“I know you, Sissy. You’re just like Daddy. He never could let it go, either. Mom and me, we just wanted to forget the whole thing.”
We sat in silence for protracted moments before I said, “I’ve always wanted to make sure the man paid for what he did to you.”
As I spoke, I had been studiously avoiding Tricia, but when I finally had the courage to meet her eyes again, I looked into complete blankness. Tricia’s expression was slack but not shocked, but beyond that her reaction was a mystery to me.
“Revenge, payment,” Tricia said as she ran her bright pink nails along the edge of the dining table. “Justice. I’ve thought about them all, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out what I really wanted.”
Tricia’s voice went quiet and her hand stilled.
“What do you really want?” I asked, afraid of her response.
“Nothing. I don’t want a thing,” she said. “Like I said: I don’t want to be trapped in the past any longer. I just want to forget it.”
We both stared at the tabletop for long, awkward moments.
“I thought the time limit thing expired, right? Two years ago,” Tricia said, still in that monotone that made my heart constrict with worry.
“The statute of limitations did expire,” I said, hurrying to explain, “but there’s an exception for DNA evidence.”
Tricia blinked at me, causing me to suspect that she had blocked out all the information about what evidence had been collected and how.
“If we can match the suspect’s DNA to the sample collected at the crime scene,” I said carefully, “then he can still be charged and punished.”
“Oh,” my sister said. “So there will be a trial? I’ll have to testify?”
My guts clenched inside me, and I turned my eyes forward, staring at pictures on the dining room wall above her head. Pictures of us as little girls, of our family around the Christmas tree, of an innocent time.
“Yes, there will probably be a trial, and you’ll be asked to testify,” I said, then added, “but there are people who will help you through it.”
“No.”
Though Tricia’s voice had not changed volume, that one word, roughly whispered, pierced me like a scream. I turned back to her. She was facing me fully now, her eyes hard.
“I can’t go through this again. Can’t go back to this.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, afraid to hear her answer.
“You know the worst part of what happened to me? It wasn’t the pain, humiliation, fear, or rage. It was realizing for the first time that I was truly powerless. That I had no control over what happened to my body that night. I had no choice.”
“You aren’t powerless,” I insisted, leaning forward slightly as if my proximity alone might help her understand. “You can still make him pay.”
“Pay? Pay how?” she asked and then paused. “Why? Why bother? Even if his life is taken in punishment for what he did to me, how will that help me?”
I opened my mouth to respond and then closed it.
“Do you know what I want? What I’ve always wanted?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“I wanted to have a choice.”
“Y
ou do have a choice,” I said. “You have always had a choice.”
“No, I haven’t. I never had one. Not in what happened to me that awful night and not in what happened afterward. Did you ever think about that?” she demanded. “I mean, Daddy drove me to the police station, made me file that report, made them do all those horrible tests at the hospital. Now you tell me that you’ve been trying to find the guy and make him pay. You’ve got him, and I have to testify. Seventeen years later, I still don’t have a choice.”
“I assumed you’d want justice,” I said. “And to make sure the guy never hurt anyone else ever again.”
“You know what I wanted back then?” she asked, ignoring my words. “Peace. I wanted a moment’s peace so I could just breathe. I wanted the world to stop spinning out of control and I wanted to think, but people just did all this shit because they thought it was ‘best for me.’ Eventually, I just gave up wanting anything.”
I stared at Tricia, almost uncomprehendingly. What I’d done had been for her benefit.
Prosecuting Slidell for his crime was the right thing to do. How could doing the right thing possibly be wrong? How could Tricia want to let her rapist walk away unpunished?
Why would she want that?
Try as I might, I couldn’t comprehend it.
My mother chose that moment of horrible silence to reenter the dining room with a pecan pie in one hand and a stack of dessert plates in the other.
“What did you give up wanting, hon?” she asked Tricia, obviously having overheard her last sentence but not grasping the tension in the room.
“Nothing, Mom,” Tricia said as her fingers worked at the edge of the table. “I don’t want anything.”
“Not even pecan pie?” she asked brightly, placing the plate in the center of the table and tilting it toward us so we could see the crystallized sugar and pecans. “It’s your favorite.”
When Tricia didn’t immediately reach for it, my mother sensed something was amiss.
“What’s going on? Did you two have a little spat?”
She made it sound as if we were sitting there arguing over a doll or the TV remote. If only we were arguing over something so trivial.
“Kind of,” I said. “I told Tricia something, and it didn’t go over the way I hoped, but I was only trying to help.”
I glanced at Tricia and then quickly back down at the pie.
“Well, I’m sure you only meant well,” my mother said. “You always mean well. What did you do?”
Might as well get this over with.
“I think I found the guy who did that awful thing to Tricia all those years ago,” I said.
“Oh,” my mother said, staring at the pie for a few terrifying seconds as she absorbed my confession. “Well, I’m sure that doesn’t matter now, does it? It was so long ago, water under the bridge, bygones.”
Her voice was too bright, her eyes shining.
“The statute of limitations has passed,” I said, confirming what I thought she meant, “but there’s an exception for DNA evidence, which we have.”
“Oh,” my mother said again as she picked up a knife and began slicing the pie with awkward, jerky strokes. “Well, then, let’s not make the exception. We don’t have to do anything. We will not do anything.”
Spiny, prickly fear became an almost tangible entity in the room. I could feel it walk up my spine and grasp hold of me by the throat.
I was going to lose my mother and Tricia.
I knew it would happen, and there was nothing to be done.
I blinked back a sudden rush of hot tears and tried to keep my eyes riveted on the pie in the center of the table, on my mother’s hand as it worked the knife, severing the confection into jagged, uneven pieces. I felt my face flush hot with confusion and something akin to embarrassment.
“But don’t you think,” I began hesitantly, “that he should pay for what he did? Get what he deserves?”
My mother began serving slices of pie on her dainty china plates.
“No,” she said, “I don’t care about him. I only care about this family.”
“Can we just forget it?” Tricia added, her words somewhere between a question and a plea. “I’m the one who’s supposed to decide, right? I decide to forget it.”
“But can you really do that?” I asked them both. “Go on as if nothing ever happened? Really? Know that he’s out there and that he’s gotten away with what he did? That he can just go on leading his life while our family suffered? That he could be doing horrible things to other women? I cannot live with that.”
We all remained silent as my mother served another slice of pie, lining up the plate with the others.
“It didn’t happen. You didn’t find him. It’s all a mistake, and we will forget it,” my mother said as she picked up the first plate and offered it to my sister. “Now, who wants pie?”
Epilogue
Two weeks later, Tripp showed up at my front door, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. Otherwise, he would have called, left a voice mail, but he’d come personally.
“It was a match, right?” I said, jumping in immediately. “Slidell is the guy.”
“You’re not even going to invite me in, Jules?” Tripp asked, tucking his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. “Inquire after my family? Where are your manners?”
I shook my head and considered decking him for messing with me at a time like this, but I avoided mentioning his family. My mother had given me the scoop, and I was guessing he wouldn’t want to talk about it.
Tripp tisked a few times and added, “If I told your mama you wouldn’t invite me in, she’d be awfully upset.”
I knew by that response and the maddening smirk on his face that I was right. Slidell’s DNA had been tested, and it was a match.
In my haste to hear the story, I grabbed Tripp by the forearm and dragged him inside.
“Okay, Miss Manners,” I said, “you’re inside. Now start talking.”
“No sweet tea?” he asked as he sauntered ahead of me into the kitchen. “Leftover pie?”
From behind him, I growled and shoved him toward the kitchen.
“No need to get violent, Jules,” he tossed over his shoulder, “I know where the fridge is.”
Once in the kitchen, he stopped and turned to me, his gaze level and serious.
“Slidell’s DNA was a match. I wanted to tell you in person. I don’t know why.”
He paused.
“No, I know exactly why,” he said. “I’ve been a part of this from the beginning, and you know I didn’t always approve of the way you handled things. You know I wanted to go by the book, trust the system to work it out, but I have to tell you, Jules, I always admired you. I might have wanted to give you a good, hard shake now and then, but you never quit. You found the guy, and now he can be punished.”
Surprised to feel tears of joy sliding down my cheeks, I looked up at Tripp.
“Hey,” he said softly, pulling me into his arms and rubbing my back gently. “If I’d known you’d get all emotional about it, I wouldn’t have messed with you for so long.”
I pulled away and swiped at my eyes, embarrassed.
“No, it’s not that. I knew you had good news. It’s just….”
My voice trailed off. I didn’t know how to explain it. My whole body was flooded with joy and trepidation. Here was Tripp, admiring my perseverance, when he didn’t even fully comprehend the dangers that still lurked ahead.
“So you’re doing that happy crying that women do?” he asked, eyeing me.
“Yes,” I lied, pulling away to wipe my eyes with my fingertips. “That’s exactly it. I’m being female. Sorry.”
Tripp gave me the opportunity to compose myself by turning away to peruse the contents of my refrigerator. Now that was a good friend. A few minutes later, two glasses of tea sat on my counter and my face was tear-free.
“So when are you going to tell Tricia?” he asked.
“Already don
e it,” I replied, almost managing to enjoy the look of disbelief on his face.
“What? When? How’d she take it?”
“Two weeks ago,” I confessed. “We were together, she was sober, and I just thought the time seemed right. I wanted to try to prepare her.”
“Is she ready for what will happen next?” he asked.
“Not even a little,” I said, “and she’s definitely not happy with me. I don’t know what’s going to happen with her.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Tripp said, “Well, no matter what the future holds, I’ll know we did the right thing. The fact that Slidell was living with that woman and her teenage daughter creeps me out.”
“Me too,” I said, again lapsing into quiet reflection.
“I can’t believe everything that’s happened since we were kids,” Tripp said finally. “How different we are today than we were back then.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, thinking back on those days when Tripp had been my whole life.
“I thought we’d get married and live happily ever after,” he confessed, to my surprise. “But you went and broke my heart.”
I turned to study him, but he was staring down into his tea.
“Oh, come on,” I said, hoping to lighten the mood, “even if that’s true, we would have been a disaster as a couple. You know it. What with your desire to date other women and all. It never would have worked out.”
He grinned at my attempt at humor. “Yeah, I guess I had some wild oats that needed to be sowed.”
“You probably still do,” I said, thinking of his bachelor existence.
He shrugged. “I guess it’s better this way, us being friends.”
“Yeah, I like us being friends,” I agreed.
“It all turned out pretty well,” he said. “I mean, some of our dreams came true, right? I’m working Violent Crimes, just like I dreamed, and you caught your sister’s rapist, just like you dreamed. Even though things look a little wobbly now, your family can start healing, and Slidell can become someone’s prison whore.”
I laughed, finding a perverse amount of poetic justice in the idea.
“We can only hope,” I said.
