RAPE IS SOMETHING YOU RECOVER FROM, but at first you don’t believe you ever will. It haunts you like a nightmare that has no waking end. Over and over I saw myself as the patrolmen must have seen me, pants down, bleeding and exposed. Degraded and exposed. One of them, I’m positive, was turned on. I saw it in his eyes. And strangely enough, it’s his expression I remember most. I can’t really remember the hatred on Wayne’s face and the ripping feeling I had inside. It’s buried too deep. But I remember the secret glint in the officer’s eyes; I can’t seem to forget it.
If it had been Cagney and Lacey, the show would have stopped right there, with the dramatic moment of rescue. But somehow it didn’t. I had to go on living. And living was hard.
I had back pains and pains that shot down my legs. The entrance to my vagina was torn and my face was battered black and blue. I was afraid of noises and of the dark and I couldn’t stand to look at men; even passing them in the street scared me. I knew they weren’t all rapists, but it didn’t matter. Right after you’ve been raped you don’t feel quite the same about men; you don’t feel quite the same about your body either, you don’t feel that it’s totally yours. Some boundary has been violated; a boundary you used to feel was strong and indestructible feels more like tissue paper, easily torn.
I didn’t feel “good” anymore. I felt “bad.” In other people’s eyes anyway; in the eyes of the patrolmen, in the eyes of the doctor and nurses at the emergency room, even in the eyes of some of my friends. They were there to help me; they felt pity and they tried to be supportive, but I still felt I was the one who’d transgressed, that I was one who’d done something unspeakably wrong. Being a victim doesn’t make you self-righteous; it makes you defensive, suspicious, ashamed. I felt like people knew something about me that I didn’t want known, like they could use it against me. I felt I would never be just Pam again. I would be Pam who was raped, did you hear about it?”
Of course I was saved, I wasn’t killed; I wasn’t pregnant either, I was grateful for that. We were all saved, Trish, me, June. Not Rosalie though. And Wayne was in jail, with counts of murder, rape and attempted murder against him. If we were lucky he’d be behind bars for years after the trial.
But it didn’t make me feel better, at least in the weeks right after the rape, knowing that I’d found Rosalie’s murderer, that I’d found Trish. I would have preferred it to have been Rob or Karl who was an evil, woman-hating killer. I would have preferred it to have been anyone but Wayne, who I’d believed and tried to comfort.
Because that made it worse.
Carole tried to help. She took me to her self-defense class and wanted to practice karate moves with me at the shop. But my body hurt too much. When I saw her coming towards me with her arm upraised my heart stopped and I wanted to scream. I couldn’t defend myself.
“Hit me, Pam,” she urged. “You’re angry. You want to kill. Let it out.”
But I couldn’t hit her. I could only shrink back. The anger was deep inside, paralyzing me. I wanted to kill. I wanted to kill Wayne very badly. But I wasn’t going to be able to.
It was Beth who helped me first, Beth and Janis, who’d decided she was moving to Seattle. They took me to the ocean one weekend in late January. While Janis ran up and down the beach with her delighted terrier, Beth and I walked slowly in the wet sand. She held my hand, and she talked about herself. I could tell it was hard for her.
“I was raped too. A long time ago, when I was eighteen, after I’d moved to San Francisco. It wasn’t as violent as what happened to you, but it was pretty bad. I couldn’t have sex for a couple of years after that. The worst thing was that it was the man who I was so crazy in love with who did it.”
“How did you deal with it?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone. I tried to push it out of my mind. By not having sex I didn’t have to think about it. It was only twelve or thirteen years later that I even remembered it had happened. You’re only the second person I’ve ever told.” She watched Janis throw a stick to the dog. “She’s the first.”
“Do you think—that Wayne raped Trish too?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”
“But it’s so personal.”
“So is what happened to you.”
I didn’t say anything. It felt good to be on the foggy beach. The white breakers came in with a violent crash and slipped away again like ice melting. The sun came out at intervals, like a pebble someone kept tossing up into the sky.
I had only seen Trish twice in the two weeks since the incident at the cabin. At the hearing where we’d both testified against Wayne she’d kept her head lowered as she’d told the story. It was very simple really. Rosalie had tried to help Trish get out of prostitution and Wayne had killed her because of that. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, but she believed it now.
She was living at the runaway shelter on Beacon Hill and receiving extensive counseling. I called and asked her if she’d like to get together for dinner.
“Ernesto misses you.” I paused. “And so do I.”
She came and met me at the shop at five, wearing her familiar black hat and jeans. Her triangular face was almost bare of makeup.
“Hi, Trish,” said June, unusually gentle. Ever since that night she’d been walking around on eggshells, treating me like an invalid. I didn’t want her pity but found it difficult to talk with her about what had happened. Maybe I was upset to think she’d seen me being raped. Maybe I couldn’t help blaming her somehow for not getting there ten minutes earlier.
“Hi,” said Trish shyly. Did she remember how June had held her and talked to her?
We drove up to Capitol Hill without talking much. She said she liked the shelter, that she’d given up smoking. “Cigarettes make me sick!”
I wondered if she’d changed her mind about green vegetables. To be on the safe side I’d prepared cream cheese enchiladas that just needed to be heated up.
“It seems like years since I was here,” she said, coming into the living room. But Ernesto hadn’t forgotten her. He bounded over and threw himself at her feet like a raccoon cap, purring wildly.
“Hi boy, hi, hi.” She bent and stroked him.
“I heard from my sister in Nicaragua,” I said suddenly. “She’s having a baby. It’s going to be strange to be an aunt.”
“It’s going to be strange to be a sister,” she said. “My mom’s due in about a month. You know, she came and visited me… We talked…”
We were both polite, hesitant, afraid of treading new ground. I felt an awkwardness I hadn’t had when I was trying to save her from herself. A new vulnerability.
“That woman I mentioned, Hadley. She’s coming back to Seattle in February…”
“That’s great,” said Trish. “…Did you tell her—about what happened?”
I shook my head. “No, not yet. It’s kind of hard to talk about.”
“I know.”
“Listen, Trish, I found your diary in Rosalie’s room and your dad gave me the one you left behind. I read them.” I pulled the little books out of the shelf and gave them to her. “I’m sorry. I was trying to find you—and they did help.”
She took them without apparent emotion. “Sometimes I told the truth in them. There were a lot of things I never wrote. I’ve started a new one now. I’m going to try to be honest.”
“When I was your age…” I didn’t like the sound of that and began again. “I used to keep a diary but I stopped a long time ago. I’ve been thinking of starting one. There are a lot of things I can’t seem to talk about. I thought that if I wrote them…”
“About Wayne?”
I nodded.
“You know, it’s weird,” she said, stroking Ernesto and not quite looking at me. “When I was up in the loft, when he was—doing it to you—I felt like it was happening to me, more than when it did happen to me. I mean, it hurt me that it was Wayne who did it to me, but it had happened to me so many times that I was used to it. A long time ago I stopped feeling anything. I just went away in my head. Having sex didn’t feel like it had anything to do with me. But when I heard you struggling and moaning and heard what Wayne was saying to you, it was like I felt it was happening to me. And it hurt me in a new way. Like it was the first time I really felt it.”
I had started crying, helplessly, as the memory of that night went through me again. Trish came over and stood next to me, clumsily holding my arm and then putting her arm around my shoulders. She was taller than me and smelled very young.
“Come on, come on,” she said. “You’re still you, no matter what happened. And nobody can take that away from you.” She began to cry too, “For a long time I didn’t know that. I let everybody tell me, I let Wayne tell me, You’re no good, you’re a whore, you’re stupid, you’re never going to get off drugs. I thought it was my own voice telling me those things, but it wasn’t. It was his, it was theirs. And I don’t have to listen to it anymore.”
It had been so long since I’d had anybody to hold me, so long since I had been able to admit that I needed any kind of help at all. I stopped thinking that I was the one who was older, that I was supposed to be protecting her. I held her. I let her hold me, and cried myself out.
Afterwards we had dinner and she ate all her salad. Later we made popcorn and played a game of Scrabble. Ernesto sat in Trish’s lap; he purred like he could never get enough.