Denial (11 page)

I
know my rapist is dead. But I still need to understand him. If I can understand him, I can put him away.

I want to talk to Stevie, the owner of Global Gas, whom Detective Remas of Milbridge told me about. But every time I direct myself to dial 411 to ask for the number, I am stymied by the image of Brian Beat's dirty feet, which float, unbidden, into my mind. Why did he wash his feet in the toilet? “Did him no good. The crud on his feet.” I swat at Detective Remas's words, but his words float back like unruly feathers.

I mean to go out to Global Gas. But the effort to extinguish the image of Brian Beat's filthy feet exhausts me.

Again and again I shove those feet away from my face. But they flit back. Since I cannot seem to dial 411, I ask Jack, my research assistant, to go find Global Gas. I do not tell my RA what I
really want to know, which is whether it is possible to steer clear of the magnetic pull of that bathroom.

Brian Beat's dirty white feet are now dipping themselves daintily in the toilet bowl and then flitting about the body shop, refusing to stay closeted in the bathroom. I want to send a dog after them, to shred them into unrecognizable meat. Brian Beat should learn to keep his feet to himself.

My RA, Jack McGuire, returns with such compelling news that I am distracted momentarily from the image of those fluttering feet. Jack reports that Brian Beat told Stevie, “I was nobody's bitch,” referring to Brian's eighteen years behind bars. So Beat was strong. He was dominant, he would like us to believe. Later, in the same conversation, Brian Beat told Stevie, “I was everybody's bitch.” So Brian wants us to know, he was open to all comers. But that isn't the worst of it. Stevie tells my RA that Brian Beat has a daughter. Stevie knows about the child because he is best friends with the child's uncle.

This cannot possibly be true. Do rapists really have daughters?

An inert body requires the application of force to set it in motion; I remember this from elementary physics. Why do I seem to lurch between a numb, inert state, when there doesn't seem to be an “I” capable of picking up the phone, and a state of pure anxiety, when momentum is almost impossible to stop? The news about Brian Beat's daughter supplies the needed force. I do not want to meet the daughter. That would hurt me. I don't know why. And it might hurt her. But I want to meet her mother.

Now I find myself able to ask Chet if he can drive me out to Milbridge again. He agrees. He will take a day off from work, he says, to drive me there. We set a date to drive out to Global Gas to meet the uncle of this child, the child of the man whom the police believe raped me.

Yes, I can carry out this project, but my goodness, I need help.

Before we leave my apartment, I suddenly realize the laundry needs washing. I scrub the kitchen. I make the beds. When this is done, I begin organizing my files. I also change my clothing several times. I know that I need to wear a long black skirt, a white blouse, and a black jacket. A kind of puritan uniform. But I have two jackets. Which one? Eventually my frenzy gets on Chet's nerves. It is time to go.

It takes an hour to get to Milbridge. Chet and I don't talk much. I feel shaky. Perhaps the cleaning frenzy has enervated me.

Global Gas is on South Main Street, just past the police station, around the corner from the house where Brian Beat grew up. When we walk into the body shop, I have a kind of tunnel vision. I see Stevie, Brian Beat's friend, who seems to leer at me expectantly, and Uncle Henry, who looks pained.

Henry offers a gnarled, oil-stained hand to Chet, who shakes it manfully. My hands flutter, ashamed of themselves, to my sides. I am alarmed by the oil stains, and ashamed of my alarm. I am also deterred by the pain I sense in Henry's hands.

“I have arthritis,” he says, relieving me, at least momentarily, of the misery I feel at my inability to touch him, or anyone else for that matter, at this moment.

“Could we go for coffee?” I ask.

I have an urgent need to get away from that bathroom.

“I don't have much time,” Henry says.

“Someplace where we can sit,” I say.

There is a Dunkin' Donuts about a mile away. We follow Henry's black pickup truck with its artificially engorged tires. I sense my features changing. My eyes seem to swell. I cannot focus.

Do rapists really have daughters?

A cage floats down from the heavens, encasing my body in glass. Chet does not see the cage. He thinks I am with him in the car, but in fact, I am alone in a parallel world. I look and sound relatively normal, but really, I'm only half here, only half alive.

We turn the car into the entrance of the coffee shop. The ticking of the turn signal scrapes against my inner ear.

Henry waits for us inside the coffee shop. We find an empty table. We sit under the nauseating glare of fluorescent lights. I hear the dizzyingly familiar buzz. Terrors are brought back to me by this sound, but I don't know what they are or why. The coffee creamer feels far away, but the ceiling presses close. The hand that holds my coffee cup does not look like mine. I sip my coffee carefully, worried that I might drop the cup or spill the hot liquid. There is a strangely altered distance between table and mouth. Here is what makes me feel so very alone in these moments: nobody else notices that I am no longer in the room.

I am not entirely sure that I will live through this interview, so the best thing is to jump right in, get it over with.

“Tell me about your sister and Brian Beat,” I say to Uncle Henry.

“I don't know exactly what happened,” he says. “When she got pregnant, I was in Vietnam. My sister, after she got pregnant, she moved to Connecticut. She married someone else. Beat went out to California. He was dating a girl out there. The girl's father was a cop. The father didn't like Beat. I think she accused Beat of rape.”

So Brian Beat may have been accused of rape in California, too.

“I didn't like Beat,” he confesses. “But I think he was falsely accused. I don't believe he raped anyone. He was smart. He was brilliant. He could have done anything.

“But he was leading my sister down the wrong road,” he says. “They would run off to Webster or to Worcester. They were taking drugs, and I was the one sent off to find them.

“You really have to talk to my sisters,” he says, anxious to be done with me.

“I would like to,” I say, equally anxious to be done with this
interview, mainly because I'm so dizzy. I ask Henry if he would call his sister Abby to tell her that I'd like to talk to her.

“I'll call Fay,” he says, referring to their younger sister.

“Abby is difficult,” he says. Henry and Abby are mostly out of touch. He does not even have her number.

I notice that the skin on his face looks raw, as if his flesh had been lashed by the wind.

“She's had a very hard life,” he adds, defending his sister from some unspecified person's critical eye.

But then, as if to correct the record, he says, “She brought it all on herself.”

I hear the sound of unrelenting rain. Such bleakness here in Milbridge.

He pulls himself up taller now, reining himself in. “She made her bed. Now she'll have to lie in it,” he concludes.

I look around the coffee shop and then back at our table. Now I notice that it is dented and unsteady, that some of the silverware is bent from overuse. Scruffy white tufts of an asbestos-like substance are protruding from the back of Henry's chair, which is upholstered in gray Naugahyde, the same color as the examining table in my grandfather's office.

There is a silence. I wonder to myself, What bed does he have in mind? The one she made with Brian Beat nearly forty years ago? Such a common expression, I think to myself, this making of the bed that now we have to lie in. But so very cruel.

He must have sensed my confusion.

“She used to be a nurse, but she got into a fight with someone at work. The police were brought in to investigate. They found that she had been caught with a needle in her purse when she was fourteen years old. It was still on her record,” he tells me, “from the time she was hanging out with Beat. They fired her. She's on disability now.”

While he talks, he dials his sister Fay's number. She is at her
desk at work. I see Henry's face soften as he hears his younger sister's voice. They chat briefly. Then he tells Fay that a researcher is interested in talking to Abby.

Henry hands me the phone. I tell Fay I'm conducting research on trauma and violence, and that I'm hoping to talk to Abby about Brian Beat. Fay doesn't seem entirely surprised, though I hear suspicion in her voice.

“A reporter came to talk to us once before,” she scoffs. From the sound of her voice, she does not appear to have held this reporter in high esteem. “Sally, our oldest sister, was murdered,” she says, “and a reporter came to investigate. But the story never ran.”

I catch my breath.

“When?” I ask, wondering if Beat could have been the murderer.

“In 1974,” she says. “We know who murdered Sally. It was her husband. We know it. But he was friends with all the cops up there. Up in Gorham. Friends with the DA. There was a big cover-up,” she spits.

I ask more questions, half horrified, half incredulous. How could there be so much violence hatched in this tiny town? Later, I will find press coverage of Sally's murder, which occurred in August 1974, several months after Brian Beat was imprisoned. So he wasn't a murderer. At least, he didn't murder Sally.

Now that she has this story about the unreliable reporter off her chest, she is ready to give me her sister's number. But first she wants to tell me her own view of Brian Beat.

“Everyone was shocked when Brian was arrested,” she says. “He was just gorgeous,” she adds, breathlessly, as if Brian's “gorgeousness” were clear proof of his innocence, as if she is confident that this one word will dispel any doubts I might harbor. There is a girlishness to her voice now, a gossipy tone. She seems to relish the memory of her big sister's beau. “The girls were
throwing themselves at him. I don't believe he could possibly have raped anyone; he wouldn't need to,” she says. “He dressed—well, you would be amazed. Like someone, what do you call that magazine, like someone out of
GQ
. But you really need to speak to Abby—she is the mother of his child.”

Finally, she gives me Abby's number.

I am still sitting across from Henry under the buzz and glare of the fluorescent lights. The perspective in the room is still annoyingly off.

I dial Abby's number. She does not answer. In my daze, I let the phone keep ringing. A ringing in my head. Finally, there is a woman's voice.

“Hello,” I hear. A kind of croak.

I explain that I am researching cycles of trauma and violence and that I am hoping to speak with her about Brian.

She takes in this information. She does not appear to be shocked. Perhaps she, too, talked with the reporter after Sally's death. But she says, “I'm not well.” There is a pause. “I'm not even dressed.”

Perhaps she senses disappointment in my silence. “I will be willing to talk to you about this if you can drive down another time,” she says.

I am devastated. Childishly so. In this moment, I am not at all sure I will ever be able to come back to this part of the state. But I manage to recover a sense of professional equanimity. This is not the first time a potential interviewee has refused to talk to me. Once I flew all the way to Amman to talk to Hamas members there, only to be rebuffed when I arrived.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she changes her mind. Perhaps she is curious.

“My house is a mess, so we'll have to go out,” she warns me. “Give me an hour to get dressed,” she adds. I look at my watch. It is 12:45
PM
.

When we take our leave of Henry, I have trouble locating the car in the small lot behind the coffee shop. The car looks different—longer, or maybe shorter. I feel that I am different, too. My features feel even more swollen. The phrase
features swollen like those of a mongoloid child
come to my mind. That was the cruel term used for hydrocephalus when I was a child.

“Do I look different?” I ask Chet.

He tells me that something may have happened to my pupils.

We drive the fifteen miles to Worcester, then stop for lunch to allow Abby time to dress. Chet, as usual, is in a mood to explore. He is delighted to be driving to a part of Worcester he's never seen, delighted to try a new restaurant, delighted to meet someone new. I am not at all delighted by any of this. I have an overwhelming desire to shut myself in like a bivalve. But another feeling competes with my desire to hide—I am curious. What will I learn from Abby? And I also want to know, what will happen to my body and mind when I hear whatever it is she has to say?

After lunch, we make our way to Abby's house. She has provided directions, but she hasn't taken one-way streets into account. After several false turns, and several stops to consult passersby, we finally find Abby's street, and then her home. She lives in an apartment in a triple-decker house. The house has gray siding. The siding is slipping.

I call from the street to tell Abby we're outside. She comes downstairs. She locates our car. It is still raining, with a heavy gray sky, but she blinks, as if adjusting to the light of day. I notice long straight hair, long legs, blue jeans, a 1960s look. Her face is traced with delicate lines. She has no scent. Remnants of her good looks remain, intensifying an overwhelming sense of loss I feel in her presence. The vulnerability in her glittery blue eyes makes me feel I ought to look away. It is as if, in observing the lines that faintly crease her delicate skin, I am trespassing on some private grief.

“Dunkin' Donuts is just a couple miles down the road,” she says.

I offer her the backseat, then scramble to gather my son's leavings—half-eaten muffins, mittens, an extra pair of boots. She sits down and buckles herself in, but then suddenly comes to her senses.