Lucky

by Alice Sebold

  The men outside were happy. Slapping backs and teasing Officer Clapper for his red hair. He was a “beanpole,” a “carrottop,” and “young stuff.”

  He ducked his head in the room.

  “Hi, Alice,” he said. “Remember me?”

  I smiled ear to ear. “Yes, I do.”

  The men outside roared.

  “Remember you? How could she forget you? You’re the next best thing to Santy Claus!”

  Things settled down. A call came in. Two of the men left to respond. Officer Clapper had to go write up a report. My officer brought me back into the room where I had met Sergeant Lorenz three days short of exactly six months before. He took my affidavit, quoting heavily from the detailed description I had written down.

  “Are you ready for this?” the officer asked me at the end of the affidavit. “We’ll arrest. You have to be willing to testify.”

  “I am,” I said.

  I was driven back to Haven Hall in an unmarked car. I called my parents and told them I was fine. The officer filed his final report on case F-362 before it was transferred back to Sergeant Lorenz.

  Rape 1st

  Sodomy 1st

  Robbery 1st

  While I was still in the CID Office with the victim the Gen Mess, was broadcast and immediately upon the broadcast there was a response from Car #561 P.O.P. Clapper, who stated that he had spoken to a person who fit the rape suspect’s description at approx 1827 hrs on Marshall St. He informed me that the person whom he had spoken to was one Gregory Madison. Madison has a record and has done time in Prison. A photo line-up was to be conducted in CID Office by EO.E Clapper but there was no negative. It is almost certain that the suspect in question is Gregory Madison. An affidavit was taken from the victim and P.O.P. Clapper. Arrest is imminent.

  Description broadcast to both 3rd and 1st shift coming on. If located observe and ask for assistance. Suspect considered armed and dangerous.

  That night I had a dream. A1 Tripodi was in it. In a prison cell, he and two other men held my rapist down. I began to perform acts of revenge on the rapist but to no avail. He wrested loose from Tripodi’s grasp and came at me. I saw his eyes as I had seen them in the tunnel. Close up.

  I woke screaming and held myself upright in my damp sheets. I looked at the phone. It was 3:00 A.M. I couldn’t call my mother. I tried to sleep again. I had found him. Again, it would be just the two of us. I thought of the last lines in the poem I had turned in to Gallagher.

  Come die and lie, beside me.

  I had issued an invitation. In my mind, the rapist had murdered me on the day of the rape. Now I was going to murder him back. Make my hate large and whole.

  EIGHT

  In the first month at school, I had kept largely to myself, focusing intently on my two writing workshops. I called Mary Alice the day after seeing the rapist on the street and told her about it. She was thrilled but frightened for me. She was also busy. She, Tree, and Diane were rushing sororities. She had her sights set on Alpha Chi Omega. It was a sorority for good girls who were both athletic and academic. It was all white. Mary Alice was a shoo-in.

  Her pursuit of such things, despite the running cynical commentary she provided on the rituals and idiocies of the rush process, divided us. I did not spend day-to-day time with her.

  Tentatively, I made one new friendship. Her name was Lila and she came from Massachusetts by way of Georgia. But unlike my mother, who approved of all things Southern, Lila had no accent. They had drummed it out of her, she said, when she enrolled in high school in Massachusetts. To my ear, she’d done a fine job. My mother swore any Southerner would know better, could pick up the slight lilt and drawl in her words.

  She lived on my hall at Haven, six doors down. She was blond and we both wore glasses. We were the same size, that is to say, slightly overweight. She considered herself a grind, a “social retard.” I saw it as my duty to draw her out. I could sense she had a zany side. Lila was also, as Mary Alice still was, a virgin.

  Lila was a perfect audience of one. Unlike my pairing with Mary Alice, I was not the oddball sidekick of the popular girl. I was the slightly thinner one, the louder one, the braver one.

  One night I told her she needed to find her inner animal and said, “Watch me!” I took a box of raisins and stabbed it with a knife, grimacing and mugging for the camera she held. I made her switch places and stab the raisins. In the pictures from that day, I mean it. I’m after those raisins. Lila couldn’t quite get into the role I’d made for her. Her blade is poised delicately over the already perforated box. Her eyes are sweet and her face a schoolgirl trying her best to appear passionately dismayed.

  We specialized in getting the giggles. I anticipated her scheduled study breaks and tried to cajole her into making them longer, making them arc over a whole evening in my room, where, in laughing with her, I wouldn’t have to think about anything outside.

  On October 14,1 was on campus. Downtown, Investigator Lorenz called Assistant District Attorney Gail Uebelhoer, who had been assigned to review the case prior to presentation to the judge for warrants. ADA Uebelhoer wasn’t in. Investigator Lorenz left a message.

  “Gregory Madison was arrested at two P.M.”

  I made the papers for the second time. VICTIM POINTS FINGER was the headline for the small, five-paragraph item in the Syracuse Post-Standard of October 15. Tricia, from the Rape Crisis Center, mailed this to me, as she would all subsequent articles.

  A preliminary hearing was scheduled for October 19 at Syracuse City Court. The defendant was Gregory Madison, the plaintiff the People of the State of New York. It was a hearing held to determine if there was enough evidence in the case to support a grand jury. I was told that witnesses being called might range from the medical doctors who had completed the serology report the night of my rape, to Officer Clapper, who had seen Madison on the street. I would testify. So might Madison.

  I needed someone to go with me to the hearing, but Mary Alice was busy, and Ken Childs was obviously not the right choice. Lila was my new friend; I didn’t want to ruin that. I approached Tess Gallagher and asked her if she’d come. “I’m honored,” Gallagher said. “We’ll have lunch in a good restaurant. My treat.”

  I don’t remember what I wore, only that Gallagher, who was known on campus for flamboyant dress and just the right hat, wore a tailored suit and sensible shoes. Seeing her hemmed in this way, literally, made me know she had prepped for battle. She knew how the outside world judged poets. I know I wore something appropriate. In the halls of the courthouse we looked like what we were: a coed and her youthful mother figure.

  My greatest fear was the possibility of seeing Gregory Madison. Tess and I walked through the halls of the Onondaga County Courthouse with a detective from the Public Safety Building. He was meant to guide us to the correct courtroom, where I would meet the attorney chosen to represent the State. But I had to use the ladies’ room and he had only a vague idea where it was. Tess and I went off in search of it.

  The old part of the courthouse was marble. Tess’s low heels clicked against this in a staccato beat. We finally found the bathroom, where, fully clothed, I sat in a stall and stared at the wooden door in front of me. I was alone, however briefly, and I tried to calm down. The walk from the Public Safety Building and into the courthouse had left my heart in my throat. I had heard the phrase before but now I literally felt as if something thick and vital were jammed in my throat and thumping. Blood rushed to my brain and I put my head down, trying not to heave.

  When I emerged I was pale. I did not want to look at myself in the mirror. I looked at Tess instead. I watched her readjust two decorative combs on either side of her head.

  “There,” she said, happy with the way they set. “Ready?”

  I looked at her and she winked back at me.

  Tricia was standing with the detective when we returned. Tricia and Tess were a study in opposites. Tricia, who represented the Rape Crisis Center and signed her notes to me “In sisterh
ood,” was the one I didn’t quite trust. Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly. Tricia was too interested in drawing me out. She wanted me to feel. I didn’t see how feeling was going to do me any good. Onondaga County Courthouse was not a place to open up. It was a place to hold fast to what I knew to be the truth. I had to work at keeping every fact alive and available. What Tess had was mettle. I needed this more than an anonymous sisterhood; I told Tricia she could go.

  Tess and I sat on a wooden bench outside the courtroom. It reminded me of the benches in the closed-in pews at St. Peter’s. We waited for what seemed like hours. Tess told me stories about growing up in Washington State, about the logging industry, about fishing, and about her partner, Raymond Carver. My hands were sweating. I had a short bout of uncontrollable shaking. I heard less than half of the words Tess said. I think she knew this. She wasn’t actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the lullaby stopped.

  She was irritated. Looked at her watch. She knew she couldn’t do anything. A diva on campus and in the poetry world, she was just a small woman with no power now. She had to wait it out with me. Our lunch treat seemed very far away.

  Since that day, if I am made to wait long enough for something I dread, my nervousness dissipates into a steely boredom. It is a mind-set and it goes like this: If hell is inevitable, I enter what I call trauma Zen.

  So by the time ADA Ryan, assigned to the case that day because ADA Uebelhoer was in court with another matter, walked up to introduce himself, Tess was silent and I was staring at the elevator six feet away.

  Ryan was a young man in his late twenties or early thirties. He had reddish-brown hair in need of a comb. He wore a sort of nubby sport coat with suede elbow patches, which seemed more in place on the campus I’d just left than inside a courtroom.

  He called Tess “Mrs. Sebold,” and, after being corrected and informed that she was one of my professors, he grew flustered. He was embarrassed and impressed. He stole little looks at her, trying both to include her and figure her out at the same time.

  “What do you teach?” he asked her.

  “Poetry,” she said.

  “Are you a poet?”

  “Yes, actually,” Tess said. “What do you have for our girl here?” she asked. I wouldn’t understand it until later, but the ADA was flirting with Tess and she, swiftly and with a skill developed from experience, deflected him.

  “First up, Alice,” he said to me, “you’ll be happy to know that the defendant has waived his right to appear.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that his attorney has agreed not to contest identification.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Yes. But you still have to answer any questions his attorney has.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “We’re here to prove it was a rape. That the act with the suspect was not consensual but forcible. Understand?”

  “Yes. Can Tess come with me?”

  “Quietly. Don’t speak once you walk through that door. The professor will slip into one of the seats in the back near the bailiff. You’ll approach the stand and I’ll take it from there.”

  He went into the courtroom doors to our right. Across from us, a group of people got off the elevator and started walking toward us. One man, in particular, took a good, long look at both of us. This was the defense attorney, Mr. Meggesto.

  A while later, a bailiff opened the door of the courtroom.

  “We are ready for you, Miss Sebold.”

  Tess and I did as Mr. Ryan had instructed. I walked to the front of the courtroom. I could hear papers shuffling and someone clearing his throat. I stepped into the witness stand and turned around.

  There were only a few people in the room and only two rows near the back, which composed a gallery. I saw Tess to my right. I looked at her once. She gave me a “go get ‘em” smile. I didn’t look her way again.

  Mr. Ryan approached me and established my name, age, address, and other vitals. This gave me time to adjust to the sound of the court reporter’s machine and to the idea that all of this was being written down. What happened to me in that tunnel was now something I would not only have to say aloud, but that others would sit and read and reread.

  After asking a few questions about how the light was that night and where the rape took place, he asked me the question he had warned me I would have to answer.

  “Can you tell us in your own words what happened at that time?”

  I tried to take my time. Ryan frequently interrupted my account. He asked about the lighting again, whether there was a moon out, whether I struggled. He wanted details of whether blows struck were open-handed or close-fisted, asked whether I feared for my life, and questioned me about how much money the rapist had taken from me, and whether I had given it willingly or not.

  After I described the fight outside the tunnel, his questions turned to the events inside the amphitheater.

  “Describe to me, from the time he took you into the theater, what force he used and what you did prior to the act of sexual intercourse that occurred.”

  “First he brought me up to his face with his hands around my neck and kissed me a couple of times and then said to take my clothes off. He tried to take my clothes off first. He couldn’t get my belt undone. He told me to do it and I did.”

  “When he told you to take your clothes off, was that before or after he told you he would kill you if you didn’t do what he told you?”

  “After—and I was bleeding at the time—my face wasn’t in the best of shape.”

  “You were bleeding?”

  “Yes.”

  “From falling down?”

  “From falling down and him hitting me and smashing my face.”

  “Prior to the act of sexual intercourse you described, he struck you?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  “Where did he strike you?”

  “In the face. I couldn’t breathe for a while. He kept his hands around my neck, he scratched my face. Also, he just generally punched me around when I was on the ground and he was sitting on me to keep me from going anywhere.”

  “All right,” Ryan said, “and after this you mentioned he was having some difficulty having an erection for some period of time, is that right?”

  “Umm-hmm.” I had forgotten the instructions from the judge. I was supposed to clearly enunciate a yes or a no.

  “What happened after that?”

  “He wasn’t able to have an erection. I didn’t really know if he had or not—I’m not familiar with that. But, then, before he came into me and had intercourse, he stopped once and made me get on my knees and he was standing up and he told me to give him a blow job.”

  “Did there come a time after this you eventually did get away from him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “After he did come in me, he got me up off the ground and started dressing and found some of my clothes and gave them to me and I put those on, and he said, ‘You’re going to have a baby, bitch—what are you going to do about it?’”

  I detailed how the rapist hugged me, apologized, then let me go, only to call after me.

  Ryan paused. His next few questions were my only rest period. What was taken from me during the incident? What was the rapist wearing? His size? His appearance?

  “I don’t recall whether you mentioned whether he was white or black,” Ryan said before closing.

  “He was black,” I said.

  “That is all, Your Honor.”

  Ryan turned to sit down. The judge called, “Cross,” and Mr. Meggesto stood and approached.

  Both defense attorneys who represented Madison over the course of the year shared certain traits. They were shortish, balding, and had something fetid going on on their upper lips. Whether it w
as an unkempt mustache as in Meggesto’s case, or grainy beads of sweat, it was an ugliness I focused on as each one cross-examined me.

  I felt if I was going to win, I had to hate the attorneys representing him. They may have been earning a paycheck, or randomly assigned to the case, had children they loved or a terminally ill mother to take care of. I didn’t care. They were there to destroy me. I was there to fight back.

  “Is it Miss See-bold—is that the way it is pronounced?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Sebold, you said you were at 321 Westcott Street on the night of the incident?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  The tone of his voice was condemning, as if I had been a bad little girl and told a lie.

  “How long had you been there on this evening?”

  “From approximately eight to midnight.”

  “Did you have anything to drink while there?”

  “I had nothing at all to drink.”

  “Did you have anything to smoke while you were there?”

  “Nothing at all to smoke.”

  “Did you have any cigarettes?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t smoke that evening?”

  “No.”

  “You had nothing to drink that evening?”

  “No.”

  That tack not having worked, he moved on to his next.

  “How long have you worn glasses?”

  “Since I was in the third grade.”

  “Do you know what your vision is without glasses?”

  “I am nearsighted and can see very well close up. I don’t know exactly, but it isn’t that bad. I can see road signs and such.”

  “Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you need your license?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You maintain your driver’s license?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t know what he was doing. It made sense to me that he might ask if my license required me to wear corrective lenses. But he didn’t. Was I a better or worse person with a license? Was I firmly an adult and not a child, making it less a crime to rape me? I never figured out his reasoning.