Rape Read online

  “My son was sensitive. He took things hard. He was driven to this. He could not sleep, he could not eat, and his bowels were never right anymore. Through the night we would hear the toilet flush. I hope they are happy now! These bloodsuckers who hide behind the law. I pray God that if there is justice on this earth it is exacted in the right place and on the right people, soon.”

  Heaven

  Part III

  Lonely

  FROM TIME TO TIME you see him: Dromoor.

  Always unexpectedly. Always it’s a shock.

  A young police officer in uniform. Climbing out of a police vehicle. Walking on the street. Once, in Central Park, on horseback riding with another officer. Lean, straight-backed, head close-shaven at the back and sides and dark glasses covering his eyes.

  You pause, you’re stricken into silence.

  It’s years later. It’s another world. This world of urban New York City where you and your husband live, in no way contiguous with the lost world of your Niagara Falls girlhood. As your husband is in no way kindred to the boys and men you’d known in that world, of whom you have told him virtually nothing.

  When will you tell him? Maybe never. For why tell him? He would not understand. There was ugliness in that world but there was beauty, too. There was hatred, but love. Only one man could understand and your husband is not that man.

  You know that Dromoor isn’t a uniformed police officer any longer. He isn’t assigned to the street. He’s Detective First Class John Dromoor, he wears clothes like any civilian, coat, probably a white shirt, a tie. Not likely he’d be in New York City, either. Last you heard he was still with the NFPD, promoted and transferred to the First Precinct.

  Last you heard was years ago. Before even your mother married her friend DeWitt. Ex-navy man she’d met at the Christian Fellowship Tabernacle where a woman friend from AA had taken her.

  A long time ago. After Fritz Haaber. After the surviving rapists plea-bargained degrees of guilt, accepted prison sentences and agreed to no trial.

  No trial. Teena burst into tears, so grateful.

  You have to concede, by now Dromoor would be middle-aged. Hard to imagine that man other than he’d been but in fact it’s possible you wouldn’t recognize him.

  “Beth? Is something wrong?”

  Your husband is touching your arm. Sometimes he’s annoyed by these sudden fugues of yours on the street, sometimes he’s concerned. He never seems to see who, or what, has captivated your attention so that you stand transfixed, staring. And then, waking from the trance, you feel a wave of heat rising into your face as if you’ve been slapped. You stammer, “Why—why do you ask?”

  “You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you’d forgotten I’m here.”