Vivian sits on a wooden bench in the hallway outside the courtroom. She leans forward a bit to open the purse she borrowed from Lynn, and we see that underneath her white cardigan sweater, the waist of her long dark blue skirt is pinned to cinch it small. She takes a tissue from a little packet and slips off a black vinyl pump to stuff it in the toe, where there is already a crumpled ball of white. Then she puts her shoe back on and sits up to snap the bag shut again.
She can hear footsteps on the stairs before she can see anyone—clicking steps she can tell are a woman’s. She sees her face first coming up, soft brown hair cut short around a soft round face. The woman is wearing a white blouse and a tan skirt and black shoes, and the black briefcase she carries looks like a man’s. She sees Vivian right away and starts smiling like she would meeting her at a bus stop—like she knows her and has been waiting a long time to meet her. She walks over and sits down beside her and puts her hand out over Vivian’s lap to shake. She doesn’t even check that she’s right and ask Vivian’s name. She just knows.
“Thank you for coming,” she says.
Vivian shakes her hand, but she can’t talk yet.
The woman says, “I know you didn’t want to do this.”
The woman says, “That’s common, you know. It makes a world of sense that you wouldn’t want to be here. But I think you’ll be surprised at how good you feel afterward. That’s what most women report.”
Vivian wraps the strap of her purse around her finger.
The woman looks at her watch, a white face rimmed in gold, with a black leather strap. She says, “The courtroom isn’t going to be used for anything for another twenty minutes, but after that it will be busy all day. I think we should go in and check it out now while it’s free, before you tell me your story.”
Vivian gets the strap very tight, like a little spring coil, and then unwinds it.
Carla says, “I just think it’s a good idea for it to be familiar to you during the trial. You don’t want to be wondering and worrying. You don’t want to feel surprised.”
Vivian says, “Who told you about me? How did you know to come looking for me?”
“Your old neighbor, Mrs. Ainsley. And a few coworkers of your dad’s, too, from the school.”
She winds the strap again. “I didn’t know so many people knew.”
“They didn’t know for sure. They might have helped you if they did. They just suspected. Then after you ran away—you were only fourteen, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“After that they felt more certain.”
Vivian swallows.
The woman leans toward her a little, resting her elbows on the knees of her smooth suit, like a mother. “So what I’d like to do first is show you the courtroom. So you can see where everyone is going to sit.”
Vivian nods. “Okay.”
She stands and collects her purse. She pulls down the back of her sweater over the bunched top of Lynn’s skirt. Then she follows the woman through the double doors.
The jury box and witness stand and tables—everything inside is a honey-colored wood, and the floor is white linoleum. Their heels click as they walk down the aisle between the rows of benches, like church pews, that people can sit on to watch things be decided.
Carla says, “Do you see the witness stand there? I think you should try sitting in it if you would. To get used to it. I’ll tell you everything while you sit there. So you can picture it.”
Vivian walks toward it—a plain desk with a vinyl swivel chair behind, and another wood wall behind that. She has to take two steps up to sit. She looks down at the woman and all the empty seats and desks spread out below her.
The woman says, “I’ll be standing here to ask you questions, and then behind that table there when your dad’s attorney is asking you his own questions. This table is the defense table.” She lays a hand on it. “So that’s where the defense attorney will sit. And your dad will be next to him. When was the last time you saw him? Your dad?”
Vivian is rubbing a thumbnail along the edge of the desk. With her other hand she is holding the big purse in her lap. “Back when I left. When I was fourteen.”
“You’ll have to pass by him here when you come in. He’ll be dressed in plain clothes. And he’ll be sitting in that chair.”
Vivian nods, looking not at the woman, but at the empty chair, picturing it. “Will he be able to talk? Will I hear him talk at all?”
“If he tries, he’ll be stopped. You won’t be in here when he sits in this witness box, and he’s not supposed to speak from that chair. And the jury will be watching him—he knows that—so he’s most likely to try to look unthreatening.”
“But he’ll be looking at me talking.”
“Yes.”
Vivian stops rubbing the table edge and holds Lynn’s big purse again with both hands.
Carla says, “I want to tell you—you need to know his lawyer will try to seem nice, but the aim of his questions won’t be nice. He’ll be standing where I am, as close as I am to you, trying to make you seem like your memories aren’t clear, but even if some are foggy you can just keep coming back to the ones that aren’t. We can talk about that, and I can help you learn how to show the jury that no matter what he says about what you don’t remember, there’s plenty that you do. What you remember is enough.”
Vivian’s eyes are still on the chair.
The woman says, “He’ll probably also try to make it seem like you might have a reason to make things up. He’ll ask you about your life now, so next you and I should sit down in a room with some tea or hot chocolate for a few minutes and you can tell me as much as you can about what has happened to you since you left your dad’s house. I can give you advice about how to describe it. But let me make this easy for you. No matter what you tell me, no matter what you’ve done since you left home, none of it can be the reason he did what he did to you, can it? You didn’t cause it after you left, right? So we can just tell the truth, and I can tell you how to do that so the jury will not forget which thing happened first. That your dad chose to hurt you when you were just a little girl.”
Vivian looks at her, finally, her big purse weighting her down in the chair. “You know what he used to say every time when he finished?”
“I surely don’t.”
Vivian’s face screws up, staring at the empty chair. Her eyes fill. Then she says, “ ‘I know you’ll never tell.’ ”
“Oh, honey.”
She wipes her nose with her hand, her eyes still fixed on the chair where she knows now her father will sit and see her.
Later Vivian sits in a small room with a small conference table. A big plate glass window behind her shows the city laid out flat and glinting under the lowering sun—the normal parts and then the strip with the black pyramid, a castle with a roller coaster, and the big flat building of shiny gold that says MANDALAY BAY across the top. She has her back to all this. She is making small tears like battlements in the rim of a Styrofoam cup.
When Carla comes in, she looks up.
She has papers in her hand. “You’re a very patient girl to wait for this. I wish I could have gotten them to you sooner, but I had a trial. I typed up all my notes. You can call and tell me if you think I got anything wrong.”
The little white bits lay strewn around her elbows. “That’s not why I wanted them.”
“I didn’t think so, but you still can if you notice things. I want you to.”
Vivian puts the papers in Lynn’s big purse. “Okay.” She tidies the Styrofoam into a little pile and scoops it into her hand.
The woman reaches out a cupped palm, and Vivian looks at it a second and then dumps the bits into it carefully. The woman empties her hand into a waste can behind her, her blouse rippling in an invisible shaft of air from the vent above.
Vivian slings the bag strap over her shoulder. “Well …” She blinks and stands up. “I think I should get going now. If that’s okay.”
“Of course, Vivian. You were always free to go.”
“I wanted these papers, though.”
“I would too, if I were you. You’ve been brave. You’ve done something important already, and in a few weeks you’re going to do more. You should be very proud of yourself.”
“Can you tell me?—Where is he now?”
“He still lives in the same place. He’s free until he comes here to court.”
“Does he know he’s going to see me?”
“Not yet. But he will. I’ll have to tell his lawyer I spoke to you.”
“Okay.”
“I could imagine you might worry about that. I could imagine you might worry he’ll try to contact you.”
“Do you feel safe where you are?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Because you’re right that he could. It wouldn’t be wise of him, but we can’t keep him from trying.”
“It’s all right,” Vivian says. “I’m ready, I mean.”
In her little brown car, in the parking lot outside the big courthouse, Vivian locks the doors. The sun is sinking low in the sky, making something creamy orange of the clouds behind the palm trees along the center median. She slips the papers out of Lynn’s big purse and holds them on the steering wheel:
PRE-TRIAL INTERVIEW WITH VIVIAN LOUISE ABLE
She scans through the Q and A lines until she reaches one on the second page:
Q: And I understand you have twin four-month-old babies?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell us about the father of those babies?
A: I don’t know for certain who he is. When I ran away from my dad, I mostly paid for food by washing dishes at the Denny’s on Tropicana. But I also got mixed up in prostitution.
Q: Mixed up?
A: A man told me I could stay with him. Then he wanted me to be his girlfriend. And then he said he needed my help doing a favor to some people he owed money to. It sort of snuck up on me what he was doing.
Q: And did you use birth control?
A: Yes. Condoms. But it didn’t work this one time.
Q: Do you still work as a prostitute?
A: No. I quit so I could take good care of the babies.
On the road home she listens to music—something heartfelt and twangy again with a girl’s voice and a lot of guitar. She has it turned up loud, and she has the transcript on the seat beside her. She looks at it at stoplights.
Q: How old were you the first time he climbed in your bed?
A: Eleven.
Q: The same year your mother died?
A: Yes.
And at the drive-through when she gets a Frosty at Wendy’s:
Q: Did you ever ask him to stop?
A: Yes.
And again when she pulls in at Copley’s to fill the tank on her little brown car with the gas money Lynn gave her.
Q: What did he say when you asked him to stop?
A: He said if I hushed he could finish faster.
She sets the papers on the seat and gets out, pulling the sweater down over the bunched waist of Lynn’s long skirt. The lot at Copley’s is full like it was the night she first came here. She can see people leaning over their food at the tables in back. There are two trucks pulled in at the pumps, one of them a semi and the other a white pickup. Once she gets the nozzle in and sets the trigger, she takes a step back from the pump and reaches inside her car to pull the little zippered pouch with flowers out of Lynn’s big purse. She sets it on the seat and removes a cigarette. She lights one up, her hands shaking, and takes a long drag, blowing smoke up toward the high ceiling of the shelter. There’s a bird’s nest up there, and she can see it. She watches to see if any birds peek their heads out while she smokes, listening to the rattling of the gas through the tube into her car.
Then she senses someone—a figure stepping around and standing on the other side of the nozzle to look at her—and she lowers her head to see.
It is the hunter.
“What’s shakin’?” he says.
Vivian takes another drag.
He says, “I was about to grab lunch with my buddy. You want to join us?”
Vivian looks into the passenger seat of the white pickup and sees another man like the hunter, another middle-aged man looking down at her.
“No thanks,” she says.
“ ‘No thanks,’ eh?” He leans back against the side of Vivian’s car, grinning.
Vivian doesn’t say anything.
“Well, maybe I’ll just wait a minute with you then,” he says.
Vivian looks at the numbers speeding by on the tank dials. They always have such a frantic look. It’s almost steadying for her somehow in a way she doesn’t understand.
The hunter snorts. He looks over his shoulder at his friend in the truck. Then he makes his voice louder so his buddy can hear it: “Maybe I’ll just wait so I can watch you pull out that hose when your tank is full.”
“No, you won’t,” Vivian says.
“What?”
“No, you won’t wait with me.”
He snorts again. “Or what?”
Vivian taps her ash and then rests her other hand on the gas pump trigger. “Or maybe I’ll pour gas on you and light you on fire.”
He takes a step back.
Vivian keeps her hand steady on the pump nozzle.
“Crazy bitch,” he says. He skirts around the front of her car toward his truck. “You better remember I know how to get to you.”
“You do not,” she says.
“Sure I do. Out at Lynn’s place on Route 95.”
There is a click, and the gas flow shuts off. Vivian takes the nozzle out and hangs it back on the pump. “That’s where I live now, but you have no idea how to get to me.”