Quinn could tell her parents were disappointed—they’d been expecting one session with the amazing Dr. Jacoby to unbury the pristine truth from this shitpile of dysfunction.
“You’ll keep seeing her, of course,” her mother said. “But in the meantime, we’re going to have you do a paternity test with Jesse. Okay, sweetie? I know you’re convinced it’s not his, but things happen.”
Apparently, all they needed for the test was a single hair from Jesse—he didn’t even need to know about it—and a blood sample from Quinn. Trace amounts of the baby’s DNA would be in the blood. Her mom had already made an appointment for her to get the sample drawn later today. Fine. At least it would prove she wasn’t lying about one thing.
Curled up on her bed, Quinn took out the chart of the two weeks she’d showed Dr. Jacoby and stared at it again. The answer was right there. How could she not see it?
She considered the two options—blacking out or repressing the memory. She’d read a book once where a random guy drugged a girl at an airport café, so she supposed someone could have done that to her at a coffee place or restaurant. But wouldn’t she have realized the hours were missing when she woke up? How would she have gotten home?
Although the other option, repressing a traumatic memory, was hard to imagine, the idea of a random rape somewhere in the city wasn’t impossible. This was New York: Being careful didn’t guarantee safety.
There was the trip to Maine, too, but while she didn’t rule it out, there were a few reasons it seemed unlikely to have happened there. That weekend was the first time she’d been back to Southaven, her childhood home, since moving to Brooklyn nine years ago, so the trip had been special . . . memorable. Also, she’d been with Jesse or her family almost the entire weekend. The only two times she could think of when she wasn’t with one of them were those brief moments with Marco Cavanaugh, and later that same night during the midnight swim at Holmes Cove—events that were seared on her brain in vivid detail. (Not that the coincidence of that traitorous, inexplicable kiss with Marco falling into this time period didn’t give her a sick, sticky feeling. She didn’t want to think about it, but forced herself to scan her memory: rickety dock, wind and waves, the look, the kiss, the hurried parting . . .)
Most of all, though, Maine seemed unlikely because Quinn’s memories of that weekend were intensely happy. Even with the Marco incident, it had been one of the best weekends of her life. She had a hard time imagining how a repressed rape could be part of that.
So, for now, she concentrated on her days in the city. Thinking it was possible that whoever had done this had attacked other girls, too, she went online and skimmed through a year of weekly police blotters in the Brooklyn paper, looking for reports of rapes or attempted rapes in the area. There were a few—though nowhere very nearby—and she wrote down the details in her notebook, waiting for something, anything, to trigger even the slightest hint of recognition.
When nothing did, she found herself getting more and more frustrated. More and more angry at her cowardly brain.
Not remembering isn’t going to make it not have happened, she told herself.
And whatever the truth was, it couldn’t be as bad as not knowing.
In the middle of the night while trying to sleep, Quinn couldn’t stop thinking about those police reports, couldn’t stop imagining some random, faceless man following her down a dark street or a park path, hiding behind cars or bushes, waiting for an opportunity . . .
And when a breeze came through the slightly open bedroom window and touched her bare arm, she realized that maybe her father meant a stranger could have climbed in that way and hurt her. Here, in her own bedroom. Could someone have come in that way? Eventually, knowing she wasn’t going to sleep, she slipped into the hallway, tiptoed past her sister’s room and down the stairs in the dark (paranoid, thanks to her obsessing, that she could hear someone else’s stealth footsteps on the stairs behind her own), into the kitchen and through the sliding doors into the garden. She looked up at the back of the house. The bottom section of the fire escape was slid up so that the closest rung was unreachable to anyone of normal height. If you were climbing down, you’d slide the section a few feet to reach the ground. But there was no way you could climb up on it from where Quinn stood. Unless . . . She supposed it could have been reached by standing on one of the patio chairs.
She turned and studied the backs of the buildings on the adjacent block and on Prospect Park West, scattered windows lit up here and there. The buildings were row houses and larger apartment buildings, fully attached to one another, and formed a sealed perimeter, meaning the area of backyards was a self-contained environment, not accessible from the street, only from the other buildings.
So even if someone had managed to climb the Cutlers’ fire escape, no one would have been back there who would have done that to Quinn. (You don’t know all your neighbors, a little voice said. How can you be so sure?) She took a deep breath. No. She refused to be scared in her own room.
She was about to go inside when her glance darted up to Jesse’s dark window. The fact she’d barely been in touch with him for days was completely unprecedented. What was she going to tell him? She could keep lying and stick to the story that she had the flu. If she did, she’d have to go through everything—the abortion, therapy, trying to remember—without him knowing, which sounded impossibly lonely, not to mention logistically difficult. But if she told him, would he believe her story? What if he thought she’d cheated on him? What if she lost him?
Shhh . . . the ginkgo trees’ rustling leaves said, trying to calm her. Shhh . . .
And then a tiny thought sparked in her mind.
Maybe the baby was Jesse’s. Maybe, by some fantastic, beautiful miracle, it was his. Maybe he had superhero sperm or something, able to swim their way through any barrier. Even before she and Jesse were together-together, they’d talked about what they would name their kids if they had them some day—twins, a girl and a boy, Scout and Spock. Maybe they’d brought one of these pretend kids to life just by dreaming, because they loved each other so much.
Think of how relieved her parents would be if it were Jesse’s. How much simpler everything would become.
She stood there, in the dark, listening to the reassuring whispers of the trees, and pressed a hand against her belly. Please, she thought. Please, be Jesse’s.
Once back in bed, she left her window open, determined not to succumb to fear. It kept drawing her eyes, though, and she kept picturing someone out there. A minute later, she collected up some spiky seashells from where they decorated her mantelpiece and placed them in a row along the windowsill. Sentries.