Lucky by Alice Sebold
"Yes," I said. "He never did."
I slipped out of the room and consulted with Marc. The only bathroom was through the bedroom. I wanted all details taken care of, down to this: If Marc had to urinate in the middle of the night, I told him to use the sink in his kitchen.
Back in the bedroom I slipped into bed.
"Can I rub your back?" I asked.
Lila was tucked into a ball with her back facing me. "I guess so."
I did.
"Stop," she said. "I just want to sleep. I want to wake up and have it be over."
"Can I hold you?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I know you want to take care of me, but you can't. I don't want to be touched. Not by you, not by anybody."
"I'll stay awake until you fall asleep."
"Do what you want, Alice," she said.
The next morning Marc knocked and then brought us tea. Mr. Rinehart had called with his flight number. I promised Lila I would get all of her stuff out of the apartment ASAP. She had a list of things she wanted her father and me to pack for the flight home. I called Steve Sherman. I needed a place to store my stuff. Lila had a friend who would take hers. Moving and packing: Her stuff was something I could take control of. I could serve her that way.
I stood at the same gate where Detective John Murphy had waited and watched for me. I had already met Lila's father once, on a visit to her house that summer. He was a huge, hulking man. As he approached me, I could see him begin to cry. His eyes were already red and swollen. He came up, put down his bags, and I held him as he wept.
But I felt like an alien in his presence. I knew the landscape, or so everyone imagined. I had been raped and through a trial and been in the papers. Everyone else was just an amateur. Pat, the Rineharts--their lives had not prepared them for this.
Mr. Rinehart was not kind to me. Eventually he said things to my mother and me about how they would handle their own. He told my mother that his daughter was nothing like me, and that they didn't need my advice or her counsel. Lila, he said, needed to be left alone.
But at first, on that day, he cried and I held him. I knew, more than he ever could, what his daughter had gone through and how impossible it was for him to do anything to fix it. In that moment, before the blame and separation set in, he was broken. My mistake was in not seeing how lost I had become. I behaved as I thought I should: like a pro.
At Marc's, Lila stood when she saw her father. They hugged and I shut the door to the bedroom. I went to stand as far away as I could to give them their privacy. In the tunnel that was Marc's attic kitchen, I smoked one of Marc's cigarettes. I counted, packing all our possessions in my head and distributing them to the homes of various friends. I thought a million different thoughts in every moment. When a spoon slipped in the sink, I jumped.
That night Mr. Rinehart took us out for dinner at the Red Lobster. Marc, myself, Pat, and Lila. It was all-you-could-eat shrimp night and he kept urging us on. Pat did his best and so did Marc, who preferred Szechwan noodles and snow peas. Neither Pat nor Marc were macho in the traditional sense; conversation stalled repeatedly. Mr. Rinehart's eyes were swollen and bloodshot. I don't remember what I said. I was uncomfortable. I could feel how much Lila wanted to leave. I didn't want to give her over to her parents. I thought of Mary Alice French-braiding my hair the morning of my own rape. I had sensed it almost from the start at the airport--there were going to be reasons put forth by people, by her parents, perhaps, that would prevent me from helping. I was to be banished. I had the disease, it was catching. I knew this, but I kept clinging. Clinging so hard, wanting to be with Lila in this shared thing so desperately, that my presence was bound to suffocate her.
We drove them to the airport. I don't remember saying good-bye to her. I was already thinking of the move out, of saving what was left to me.
I moved all our possessions, Lila's and mine, out of our apartment within twenty-four hours. I did it alone. Marc had classes. I called Robert Daly, a student who had a truck, and arranged for him to pick the stuff up after I had boxed it. I gave him my furniture-- whatever he wanted he could take, I said. Pat was dragging his heels.
No one seemed to understand my urgency. In the midst of packing that day, I was in the kitchen and I knocked the table with my hip. A small, handmade bunny mug that my mother had given me after the trial fell on the floor and broke. I looked at it and cried, but then stopped. There was no time for that. I would not allow myself to be attached to things. It was too dangerous.
I had cleared my bedroom out first, in the early morning, and now, as Robert was due to arrive before dark, I turned the doorknob for one last scan of my room. I had been thorough. But on the floor near the dresser I found a photo of myself and Steve Sherman that had been taken on the porch of the house over the summer. We were happy in the photo. I looked normal. Then, in the closet, I found a valentine he had given me earlier that year. The photo, the valentine were ruined now--remains of a crime scene.
I had tried to be like everyone else. During my junior year, I had given it a go. But that wasn't the way it was going to be. I could see that now. It seemed I had been born to be haunted by rape, and I began to live that way.
I took the photo and valentine and shut the door of my bedroom for the final time. I drifted into the kitchen, holding them. I heard a noise in the other room. It echoed now that I had emptied the room out.
I jumped.
"Hello?" came a voice.
"Pat?" I walked into the other room. He had brought a green trash bag to get some of his clothes.
"Why are you crying?" he said.
I hadn't realized I had been, but as soon as he asked I became aware of the dampness on my cheeks.
"Aren't I allowed to cry?" I asked.
"Well, yeah, it's just that..."
"It's just that what?"
"I guess I expected you to be okay with it."
I yelled horrible things at him. We had never been best friends and now we would cease even to be acquaintances.
Robert Daly showed up. He was a rock. That is how I remember him. We shared a taste for honest criticism in our fiction workshop and a respect for Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. Robert and I weren't close either, but he helped me. I cried in front of him and he didn't like it when I apologized. He took my rocker and daybed and some other items. For a few years, until it became obvious I wouldn't come back for them, he dropped me cards to say my furniture was doing fine and wishing I were there.
I changed, but I didn't know it.
I went home for Thanksgiving. Steve Sherman came over from New Jersey to spend time with me. He had been Lila's friend first, before becoming my boyfriend, and the idea that both of us had been raped overwhelmed him. He told me that when he found out about Lila, he had been in the shower. His roommate had come in to tell him. He'd looked down at his penis and suddenly felt a selfhatred he couldn't describe, knowing that so much violence had come to his friends that way. He wanted to help. He stored the rest of my things and I slept in his spare bedroom. When Lila came back two weeks after her rape for the GRE's, she stayed in his house. He kept me company and volunteered as my security guard, walking me home from work or class.
The division that came was inevitable, I guess. People felt compelled to take sides. It began the night of the rape when the police had come up to me so openly. Lila's friends started avoiding me, looking away or to the side. During her overnight for the GRE's, the police came to Steve's house to do a photo lineup. I was in the bedroom with Lila and two policemen. They spread the small, wallet-size photos out on the desk. I looked over Lila's shoulder.
"I bet you recognize one of these," a uniformed policeman said to me.
They had put a photo of Madison and his lineup buddy, Leon Baxter, in the pack. I was so mad I couldn't speak.
"Is the one who raped her in here?" Lila asked. She was sitting at a desk in front of me. I couldn't see her face.
I left the room. I was sick. Steve reached his arms out an
"What is it?"
"They put a photo of Madison in there," I said.
"But he's still in jail, isn't he?"
"Yes, I think so, yes." I hadn't even thought to ask.
"Attica," a uniform said in answer.
"To have to pick out her rapist and see him there, the focus is all wrong," I said to Steve. "It's not fair."
The door opened. Lila came out into the living room behind the officer who held the mug shots in an envelope.
"We're done here," a policeman said.
"Did you see him?" I asked Lila.
"She saw something," the policeman said. He wasn't happy.
"I'm stopping it now. I'm not going to pursue it," Lila said.
"What?"
"It was a pleasure getting to meet you, Alice," the officer said. He shook my hand. His partner did too.
They left and I looked at Lila. My question must have been obvious.
"It's too much," Lila said. "I want my life back. I watched what it did to you."
"But I won," I said, incredulous.
"I want it to be over," she said. "This way it is."
"You can't just will it away," I said.
But I felt her trying. She took her GRE's and returned home until after Christmas. Our plan was to live together in graduate student housing. Her family was going to loan her a car because it was the only way to get back and forth from campus. That, or the bus, which I would take.
I'll never know what the police said to Lila in that room or whether or not she saw her rapist among those men. At the time, I couldn't understand her decision not to pursue it, although I thought I did. The police had a theory that Lila might have been raped out of revenge. They based this on several things. Madison, though in Attica, had friends. He had been given a maximum sentence and would be inside a bare minimum of eight years. The rapist knew my name. Raped her on my bed. Asked after me while he did. He knew my schedule and that I was a waitress at Cosmos. All this could have been evidence of a connection to Madison, or it could just have been the thorough research of a criminal intent on finding his victim alone. I still choose to believe that part of the horror of the crime was in its cruel coincidence. Conspiracy seemed a stretch to me.
Lila didn't want to know. She wanted out of it.
The police interviewed my friends. They went to Cosmos and interviewed the owner and the man who flipped the pizzas inside the front window. But there were other rapes being done with a similar MO to Lila's. If Lila wouldn't prosecute, any link to me was now inconsequential. They had no witness and, with no witness, no case. The police dropped their investigation. Lila went home until January. She gave me a copy of her schedule. I told her teachers why she wouldn't be in attendance at finals. I called her friends.
My life became streamlined, and the fallout began.
I went home for Christmas.
My sister was depressed. She had graduated and won a Fulbright, but was now living at home and working in a garden shop. Her Arabic major was not translating into the job she had hoped for. I went to her room to cheer her up. At some point she said, "Alice, you just don't understand, everything comes so easily for you." I sputtered in my disbelief. A wall went up. I cut her out.
I had nightmares now even more vivid than before. My sporadic journal of those years is full of them. The recurring image is one I'd seen in a documentary of the Holocaust. There are fifty or sixty chalk-white and emaciated dead bodies. Their clothes have been stripped from them. The clip shows a bulldozer rolling them into a deep, open grave, the bodies plunging as a tangled whole. Faces, mouths, skulls with eyes set deep, the minds inside gone to unimaginable lengths in order to have survived. Then this. Darkness, death, filth, and the idea that one person could be struggling, trying to stay alive in there.
I woke up in cold sweats. Sometimes I screamed. I would turn over and lie facing the wall. Enter the next step: Awake now, I consciously played out the intricate plot of my almost death. The rapist was inside the house. He was climbing up the stairs. He knew, on instinct, which steps would betray him by a noise. He was loping down the hall. A breeze came through the front window. No one would think to question it if they were awake in the other rooms. A light scent of another person, someone else in the house, would waft into them, but like one small noise, it would warn no one but me that something was going to happen. I would feel then my door opening, a sense of another presence in the room, the air changed to allow for a human weight. Far away, near my wall, something was breathing my air, stealing my oxygen. My breath would grow shallow and I would make a promise to myself: I would do anything the man wanted. He could rape me and cut me and take off my fingers. He could blind me or maim me. Anything. All I wanted to do was live.
Resolved, I would gather my strength. Why was he waiting like this? I would turn slowly around in the dark. Where the man stood so vividly in my imagination, there was no one, there was the door to my closet. That was all. Then I would turn on the light and check the house, going up to each door and trying the knob, sure it would give and there he would be, standing on the other side and laughing at me. Once or twice the noise I made woke my mother. "Alice?" she would call out.
"Yes, Mom," I said, "it's just me."
"Go back to sleep."
"I will," I said. "I'm just getting something to eat."
Upstairs in my bedroom, I would try to read. Not look at the closet, or, quickly, over to the door.
I never questioned what was happening to me. It all seemed normal. Threat was everywhere. No place or person was safe. My life was different from other people's; it was natural that I behaved differently.
After Christmas, Lila and I tried to make a go of it in Syracuse. I wanted to help her, but I also needed her. I believed in talking. To be with her after dark, I quit Cosmos. This was easy: They didn't want me back. When I had gone to ask about getting day shifts, the owner was distant and standoffish. The man who flipped the pizzas came up after the owner had left.
"Don't you get it?" he said. "The police have been in here asking questions. We don't want you here."
I left in tears and walked blindly into someone.
"Watch where you're going," the man said to me.
It was snowing. I quit the Review. The bus back to the place Lila and I were living broke down a lot. Tess was on leave. I stopped going to poetry readings. One night, I was a little later than usual getting home--it had grown dark--and Steve met me at the doorstep. "Where were you?" he asked. His tone was angry, accusatory.
"We needed food," I said.
"Lila called me because she was scared. She wanted someone to sit with her."
"Thanks for coming over," I said. I was holding a bag of groceries and it was cold.
"You should have been here."
I walked inside and hid my tears.
When Lila said it wasn't working out, that she didn't like the apartment, and she was going to go home for a few weeks and then move in with Mona, a friend she'd recently made, I entered a sort of shock. I thought we'd be in this together. Clones.
"It's just not working, Alice," she said. "I can't talk about it the way you want me to and I feel isolated here."
Steve and Marc were the only two people who had regularly visited the house. Both of them, though scrupulously avoiding each other, were more than willing to sit guard. But they were my friends--my boyfriends, to be exact--and Lila knew it. They were there primarily for me, and to help me out by helping her. She needed to separate. This is clear to me now. Then, I felt betrayed. We went through our record albums and other things that had been common property over our two years together. I cried, and if she wanted something, I gave it to her. I gave her things she didn't ask for. I left possessions behind me to mark my place. Could I ever get back to where I had been? Where was that? A virgin? A freshman in college? Eighteen?
I sometimes think nothing hurt me more than Lila's decision to stop speaking to me. It was a total blackout. She did not
I moved in with Marc. In four months I would graduate. I stayed inside his apartment for everything but my classes. He drove me everywhere, a willing chauffeur, but mostly he stayed away from me. He was at the architecture studio late into the night; sometimes he slept there. When he was home I asked him to investigate noises, check the locks, to please just hold me.
The week before graduation, I saw Lila again. I was with Steve Sherman. We were in the student mall on Marshall Street. She saw me, I saw her, but she walked right by me.
"I can't believe it," I said to Steve. "We're graduating in a week and she still won't talk to me."
"Do you want to speak to her?"
"Yes, but I'm afraid. I don't know what to say."
We decided that Steve would stay where he was standing, and I would circle around again in the opposite direction.
I ran into her.
"Lila," I said.
She was not surprised. "I wondered if you'd try to speak to me."
"Why won't you talk to me?"
"We're different, Alice," she said. "I'm sorry if I've hurt you, but I need to move on with my life."
"But we were clones."
"That was just something we said."
"I've never been so close to anyone."
"You have Marc and Steve. Isn't that enough?"
We somehow got from that to wishing each other well at graduation. I told her Steve and I were going over to a nearby restaurant to have mimosas. She could come and join us if she wanted.
"Maybe you'll see me there," she said, then left.
I rushed into the bookshop we'd been standing in front of and bought her a book of Tess's poems, Instructions to the Double. Inside I wrote something that escapes me now. It was sappy and came straight from my heart. It said I would always be there for her, all she had to do was call.
We did run into her at the bar. She was tipsy and had a boy with her whom I knew she had a crush on. She didn't want to sit with us, but stood by our table while she talked about sex. She told me she had been fitted for a diaphragm and that I was right, sex was great. I was audience now, not friend or intimate. She was too busy doing what I was doing--proving to the world that she was fine. I forgot to give her the book. They left.