Lucky

by Alice Sebold

  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought that this could happen. But I hadn’t. I still envisioned him in jail, or, at least, not stupid enough to come back to the university area before the trial. But there he was. In October he had been cocksure when he spotted me. Now we saw each other, recognized each other, and nodded. No words. It was a split second. The happy frat boys and girls stood between us. We passed by them on either side. His eyes told me what I needed to know. I had become his opponent now, no longer merely his victim. This he recognized.

  Lila and I had begun, sometime that winter, to call each other Clone. We both gained from it. By being my clone, she could seem a bit more daring and wild than she really was; I could pretend that I was a normal college coed whose life revolved as much around my classes and food runs to Marshall Street as it did a rape trial. As Clones we decided to room together off campus. The two of us, and a friend of Lila’s named Sue, found a three-bedroom apartment in an off-campus area where many students lived. We were excited about living in a real house, and, certain the trial would have to be over by then, I saw this as a fresh start. We would take possession in the fall.

  By the first week of May, I was packing to go home for the summer. I’d gotten a B in my Shakespeare class and said good-bye to Jamie. I had no illusions that I would hear from him.

  I had taken a course called Cervantes in English in which, for the final paper, I took my revenge on the myth of La Mancha. I reinterpreted Don Quixote as a modern urban parable and made Sancho the hero. He was street smart where Quixote was not. In my version, Quixote drowns in a curbside puddle, unable to realize it is not a lake.

  Before I left, I called Gail to let her know my schedule. All spring, the office of the district attorney had given me an “any minute now” rap and this time was no different. She thanked me and asked me about my plans.

  “I’ll get a summer job, I guess,” I said.

  “I’m hoping we’ll go to trial soon,” she said. “You will be available, won’t you?”

  “It’s my number-one priority,” I said, not putting it together until years later: In rape cases, it was almost expected that the victim would drop out of the process even if she originally initiated it.

  “Alice, let me ask you something,” she said, her tone shifting a bit.

  “Yes?”

  “Will you have someone with you from home?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I had talked to my parents about this during the Christmas holidays and then again at Easter. My mother had spoken to her psychiatrist, Dr. Graham, about it, and my father fretted that the longer the trial was postponed, the greater the chance it would ruin his annual trip to Europe.

  Until recently I believed that their final decision, that he would be the one who came with me, was based on her own inability to be there—the unpredictable chances of a flap. But as it turned out, Dr. Graham had counseled her to go despite her panic.

  In the phone call in which my mother told me how the decision had ultimately been made, I stayed quiet. I asked the questions a reporter would ask. Numbly, I gathered the information. My mother was peeved at Graham, she said, because, of course, Graham would “support the professional, i.e., your father.”

  “So Dad didn’t want to come with me either?” I asked, playing out what she’d begun.

  “Of course not, his precious Spain awaited.”

  What I came away with was the fact that neither one of them had wanted to be at the trial with me. They had their reasons; I acknowledge these.

  Finally, it was decided, my father would come with me. I held out a small corner of hope, up until the moment my father and I boarded the plane, that my mother would park her car in the longterm lot and rush in. No matter how tough my pose, I both wanted and needed her.

  By the close of her senior year, Mary had mastered fifteen Arab dialects and won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Damascus in Syria. I was both jealous and in awe. I made my first, but not my last, joke about our respective majors. “Yours may be Arabic,” I said. “It looks like mine is rape.”

  Mary excelled academically in a way I never could, perhaps in a way I was too distracted to ever attempt. But the truth was, Mary had been escaping via academics for a long time. Raised in a house where my mother’s problems provided the glue of family, she patterned herself after my father. Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.

  I had not quite given up on the idea of the blissful sibling relationship that my mother wanted for us, but events always conspired, it seemed, to make this impossible. The City of Syracuse scheduled testimony to begin on May 17, the same day as my sister’s commencement ceremony at Penn. I continually stole her spotight whether I wanted to or not.

  I talked to Gail. They could not reschedule the trial, but they would lead with the other witnesses and somehow work it so I could testify on the second day. My father and I booked a flight for the evening of the seventeenth. Directly after Mary’s graduation, my mother would drop us off at the Philadelphia airport. Until then, my mother, father, and I agreed, Mary’s day would be our focus.

  My mother, Mary, and I went clothes shopping—Mary for a dress to wear to graduation, me for an outfit for the trial.

  Both my sister and I had strayed far from the way we were dressed as children, my mother having a penchant for the colors of the flag. Mary went toward dark greens and creams, I went to black and blue. But for the trial, I ceded my Gothic tendencies to my mother. I put her firmly in control. I would wear, as it resulted, a red blazer, a white blouse, a blue skirt.

  In the evening, on the sixteenth, my father and I packed. On the seventeenth, we all dressed in our separate rooms and prepared for the drive down to Penn. I took a last look in my mirror. Whatever the trial’s result, my part in it would be over by the time I saw myself there again. I was going to Syracuse and would meet and see many people, but all I thought about was the one appointment I had to keep. I had a date with Gregory Madison. As I opened the door of my bedroom I breathed deeply. I shut myself off. I turned myself on. I was Mary’s little sister—excited, ebullient, alive.

  At the ceremony, my father would march in his Princeton colors. Mary and he stood with us in the crowded lobby of the auditorium, where mothers and fathers fussed over the last-minute set of mortarboards, and one woman, unhappy with her daughter’s mascara, spit-washed the black flecks from under her eyes. Extended families surrounded the happy graduates, flashbulbs popped, and self-conscious girls and boys tried to make mortarboards look less than nerdy by tilting them on their heads.

  My grandmother, mother, and I found our seats on the main floor, to the side of the large body of graduating students. I stood on my chair to find Mary. I spotted her smiling beside another girl, a friend of hers I didn’t know.

  After the ceremony, we celebrated with a lunch at the Faculty Club. My mother took too many pictures of us on the concrete benches outside. My mother still has an enlargement framed and mounted from that day. I used to wish that she would take it down. But it commemorates an important day in our family: my sister’s graduation, my rape trial.

  I don’t remember the airport. I remember the rush from a day of celebration into the onset of dread. Once in Syracuse, we were met by Detective John Murphy from the DA’s office. This man, with prematurely gray hair and a friendly smile, approached my father and me as we located the signs for the main terminal.

  “You must be Alice,” he said, and extended his hand.

  “Yes.” How had he known me?

  He introduced himself to my father and to me, told us his job—to act as our escort over the next twenty-four hours—and offered to carry my bag. As we walked briskly toward the exit, he explained our accommodations and that Gail would meet us in the cafe in the lobby.

  “She wants to go over the testimony,” he said.

  Finally, I asked, “How did yo
u know who I was?”

  He looked blankly at me. “They showed me some photos.”

  “I would have hoped I looked better than that, if they’re the photos you mean.”

  My father was tense; he walked at a remove from us.

  “You’re a beautiful girl, you can tell that even in those photos,” Murphy said. He was smooth. He knew the answers to give and the things to say.

  In the county car on the way to the hotel, Murphy talked over his shoulder to my father, making eye contact with him in the rearview at lights and turns.

  “Follow sports, Mr. Sebold?” he asked.

  My father did not.

  Murphy tried fishing.

  My father did his best here but had little to go on. If Murphy had gotten up at 5:00 A.M. to study Cicero, they might have had something to start with.

  We ended up on Madison.

  “Even in holding,” Murphy said, “I might go up there and say ‘thanks’ to a guy, act all friendly with him. Then I leave. That gets them in trouble with the other inmates, makes them look like an informer. I’ll do that to that puke if you want.”

  I don’t remember my response, if I had any. I was aware of my father’s discomfort and, in turn, aware that my own comfort with such talk had grown during the last year. I liked men like Murphy. Their quick, exact talk. Their no-bones-about-it demeanor.

  “They don’t like rapists,” Murphy informed my father. “It can go rough on them. They hate child molesters the most, but rapists aren’t much above.”

  My father acted interested, but I think he was scared. He found talk like this distasteful. He liked to be in control of a discussion and if he wasn’t, he usually opted out. This meant his paying attention itself was something out of the ordinary.

  “You know, my girlfriend’s name is Alice,” Murphy said.

  “Really?” my father said, taking interest.

  “Yep. We’ve been together for some time now. When I heard your daughter’s name was Alice, I had a good feeling about this case.”

  “We’re quite fond of the name ourselves,” my father said.

  I told Detective Murphy about how my father had wanted to name me Hepzibah. That it was only because of my mother’s vehement objection that the idea died.

  He liked this. It made him laugh and I repeated the name until he got it right.

  “That’s a doozy,” he said. “You lucked out.”

  We turned onto the main street of Syracuse’s downtown. In May, it was still light at 7:30 P.M., but the stores were closed. We passed by Foley’s department store. The cursive script and old brass security gates comforted me.

  Up on our left I could see the marquee for the Hotel Syracuse. It too belonged to a more prosperous past. The old lobby was bustling. John Murphy checked us in at the reservation desk and showed us where the restaurant was. He told us he would return for us at nine the following morning.

  “Have dinner. Gail said she’d be by sometime around eight o’clock tonight.” He handed me a blue folder. “This is material she thought it might be useful for you to go over.”

  My father thanked him earnestly for his escort.

  “No problem, Mr. Sebold,” Murphy said. “I’m off to see my own Alice now.”

  We parked our bags in the room upstairs and returned to the lobby. I didn’t want to eat but I did want a drink. In the bar area of the restaurant, my father and I sat at a small round table. We ordered gin and tonics. “Your mother doesn’t have to know,” he said. Gin and tonics were my father’s drink. When I was eleven, I had watched him drink an entire pitcher on the day President Nixon resigned. My father went off to call my mother. She and her own mother and my sister would be sitting tight, she said, waiting for any news.

  While he was gone I opened the blue folder. On top was a copy of my testimony from the preliminary hearing. I hadn’t seen it before. I read over it, covering the page as I went with the folder itself. I didn’t want anyone there—the young businessmen, the older salesmen, and the sole professional woman—to see what I held in my hands.

  My father returned, trying not to disturb me while I was going over my words. He pulled out a small book in Latin that he’d brought from home.

  “That doesn’t look like good dinner material!”

  I looked up. It was Gail. She was pointing to the blue folder. At three weeks before her projected delivery date, she wore a blue maternity T-shirt, tan corduroy pants, and running shoes. She had her glasses on, which I hadn’t seen before, and she carried a briefcase with her.

  “You must be Dr. Sebold,” she said.

  Score one for Gail, I thought. I had told her once that my father was a Ph.D. and hated being called Mister.

  My father stood up to shake her hand. “Call me Bud,” he said.

  He offered to get her a drink. She said water would be fine, and as he went to the bar, she sat down beside me, bracing her arm on the back of the chair as she lowered herself down.

  “Boy, you’re really pregnant!” I said.

  “You can say that again. I’m ready for the arrival. Billy Mastine,” she said, referring to the district attorney, “gets the case because the sight of a pregnant woman makes the judge nervous.” She was laughing but I didn’t like it. I never considered anyone else my attorney. She, not the district attorney, had driven over on her offhours to review the case. She was my lifeline, and the idea that she was being punished for being pregnant seemed another antiwoman maneuver to me.

  “You know, Husa, your GYN, she’s pregnant too. Eight months. Paquette is going to bust. All us pregnant ladies surrounding him. Cross-examining us makes them look bad.”

  My father returned and we got down to business. She excused herself to my father, saying that she didn’t mean to be rude.

  “Billy and I think that his attorney might go with an impotency defense.”

  My father listened hard. He played with the two onions at the bottom of his second drink, a Gibson.

  “How can they prove that?” I asked, and Gail and I laughed. We imagined them bringing a doctor in to testify to the fact.

  Gail broke down the three kinds of rapists.

  “In all the studies they’ve done it seems like Gregory fits into the most common one. He’s a power rapist. The others are anger rapists and the worst, sadistic.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Power rapists are often unable to sustain an erection and are only able to do so once they feel they’ve completely physically and mentally dominated their victim. He might have a bit of the sadistic thrown in. We found it interesting that he was able to finally have an erection once he’d made you kneel in front of him and give him a blow job.”

  If I noticed my father at all, it was only to will myself not to worry about him.

  “I told him a lot of lies,” I said, “about how strong he was, and when he lost his erection, I told him it wasn’t his fault, that I wasn’t good at it.”

  “That’s right,” Gail said. “That would make him think he had dominated you.”

  With Gail, I could be completely myself—say anything. My father sat beside us as we talked. Occasionally, if Gail sensed his interest or his confusion, she made a gesture of inclusion. I asked her how much time Madison would get if convicted.

  “You know we offered him a plea.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Two to six, but he didn’t take it. If you ask me his attorney is too cocky. It goes tougher on them if they refuse a plea and are then found guilty at trial.”

  “What’s the maximum he can get?”

  “On the rape charge, eight and a third to twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five years?”

  “Right, but he’s eligible for parole at eight and a third.”

  “In Arab countries they cut off people’s hands and feet,” my father said.

  Gail, who was of Lebanese descent, smiled. “An eye for an eye, huh, Bud?” she said.

  “Exactly,” said my father.

 
; “Sometimes it seems fairer, but we have the law here.”

  “Alice told me about the lineup, how he could have his friend stand next to him. That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Oh,” Gail said, smiling, “don’t worry about Gregory. Whatever he was given he might manage to screw up.”

  “Will he testify?” I asked.

  “That depends on you. If you’re as strong as you were at the prelim and grand jury, Paquette will have to have him take the stand.”

  “What can he say?”

  “He’ll deny it, say he wasn’t there on May eighth, doesn’t remember where he was. They’ll create a story for October. Clapper saw him and Paquette’s not stupid enough to have his client deny speaking to a cop.”

  “So I say it happened and he says it didn’t.”

  “Yes. It’s your word against his, and this is a nonjury trial.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means Judge Gorman serves as both judge and jury. It was Gregory’s choice. They worried about the superficial swaying citizens on a jury.”

  By this time I knew what the superficial were and knew they stood in my favor. I was a virgin. He was a stranger. It had happened outside. It was night. I wore loose clothes and could not be proven to have behaved provocatively. There were no drugs or alcohol in my system. I had no former involvement with the police of any kind, not even a traffic ticket. He was black and I was white. There was an obvious physical struggle. I had been injured internally—stitches had to be taken. I was young and a student at a private university that brought revenue to the city. He had a record and had done time.

  She checked her watch and then, suddenly, reached out and grabbed my hand.

  “Feel that?” she said, putting my hand up against her belly. I felt her baby kick. “A soccer player,” she said, smiling.

  She told me that mine was not the only charge Gregory faced. He had an outstanding charge for an aggravated assault against a police officer. While out on bail since Christmas, she said, he had also been arrested for a burglary.