Denial (20 page)

How does he know this?

“I wasn't offended when I saw you in the zone. I found it endearing,” he concludes. That word.

Jack has told me a number of times that he finds my various incapacities—my inability to maintain control of documents connected with researching this book, my tendency to get lost when I'm agitated—“endearing.”

“I think people perceive you as tough. You've had this career, working for the National Security Council, working on terrorism. The things you've done seem very serious. People probably think you're an all-business type. I think the way you seem so tough has worked to your advantage. When you're in the zone, people are impressed by you, but they're also afraid of you. You don't seem approachable.”

He sees that I am puzzled.

“Remember that guy in New York?” he says, referring to a decorated military officer who had wanted to talk to me after a speech I gave, a speech that had made me nervous, and presumably put me in the zone.

“He was a captain in the army!” Jack reminds me. “But I think he may have been afraid of you. He had been stationed in Afghanistan for a year and a half. But he was nervous about talking to you! He came up to me because he wanted to talk to you. He knew I had accompanied you. You didn't seem approachable.”

He tells me that if I want to see how I come across when I'm in the zone, I should look at two different talks I gave, which were both filmed. “In the first one, you're laughing and joking with the audience. You look relaxed. In the second one, you look stern and very serious,” he says. “That's what you look like when you're in the zone.”

I have no desire to see myself in the zone. I don't know why. I don't look. Even after he reminds me to, a few weeks later.

“I had been working on this project for a year and a half, but I hadn't really thought about the connection to my own experience. But then I talked to Jen again. She was sitting at the bar. I told her, it's strange I'm doing this job for Jessica and I had this
experience myself. And she was like, you have to tell Jessica this. I told Jen, My job is strictly to get the information that Jessica needs. She told me, If you don't tell her, I'm going to.”

“Why was she so insistent that you tell me?” I ask.

“She thought it was our fate to work together. She thinks that way.”

We are both slightly embarrassed by this sort of talk, the idea that fate could play a role in our work. But Jen is an artist, so it's okay.

“I have a confession,” he says, smiling shyly.

How can he feel shy with me after all we've been through together? He has seen a part of me that I would have taken great pains to hide, had I known what I was revealing.

“I listened to the tape you gave me, the tape of you and your sister talking to the police after the rape. I couldn't stop. You sound young and you sound so bold and brave. You're laughing. You're not cowering in the corner. It's heartbreaking. It was traumatizing for me to listen to it. Because you're a kid. It's no longer easy to see you as a statistic when listening to that tape. It's over an hour long. No one was with you. Your parents weren't with you. What were you doing there alone, talking to the police without your parents? Describing the gun. Why was no one there with you? It felt voyeuristic, listening to the tape, but I had to listen. I felt dirty. Disgusted.”

I don't mind that he listened to the tape. I'm relieved. What I do mind is this zone thing. No one has ever seen that before. At least, they've never told me that they did.

A few days later I, too, try to listen to that tape. I am in the car. At first all I hear is the sound of static. Jack had the tape remastered to enhance the sound, but a loud background buzz remains. Then I hear the sound of papers rustling, and the voices of two police officers. I recognize their accent and intonation—a style of speech that my sister and I used to call a Concord accent,
which sounded so strange to us when we first moved away from New York. Then I hear a girl's voice. Is that my voice? Maybe it's my sister's. I feel uncertain. I stop the tape.

I need to pay attention to the road. I can't make out that girl's words in any case. A staticky buzz, the sound of artillery, supersedes her voice. No point listening. Plus, there is a thought, or maybe a sensation, pressing in against my head. A kind of aura. It's not real, of course. But it feels as real as the kaleidoscope pattern that blurs your mind when a migraine aura strikes. The feeling that my head might crack open like the shell of an egg, and I would fall in. An empty white eggshell. I can almost hear the cracking sound. I do not want to hear any sounds. I drive to my destination in silence and forget about the stupid tape. Until now.

“For me,” Jack says, and pauses.

“You don't need to know this.” He pauses again.

I hear a truck's brakes screech on Charles Street, a block away from my kitchen, where Jack and I are sitting, talking about him and about this work for the first time. I wait for him to tell me more about how hard this project has been for him. I feel a wave of heat rising up to my cheeks.

But actually he wants to tell me something else, something unrelated to the emotional difficulties of investigating a child rapist.

“Here I am, this night-school student in a prestigious university. I'm hired to work on terrorism,” he begins.

My pulse returns to normal.

“But then a few months later you ask me to help you with this really personal thing. It's not mundane,” he says, somewhat breathlessly, like the student that he is.

Well, that is true, I suppose. Not mundane.

“A lot of people live pretty mundane lives,” he says. “Most grad students are intimidated by their professors. Most of them hate
their jobs. They're afraid of their professors! But the protocol between us isn't really well established. I don't know how I'm supposed to relate to you because I know it's so difficult for you. There is professional distance, but there isn't. Maybe you maintain the distance more preciously because of trauma.”

What distance? I wonder. I am not aware of deliberately maintaining distance, preciously or otherwise. He has seen a side of me that I would much prefer to keep hidden. But I can't, it seems. At least not from him.

But then I realize that the cold persona I slip into, the one he says might help me in my career, might actually frighten Jack a bit, even though he knows all about what he calls the zone, even though he knows me so well.

“There is a kind of embedded anxiety in this job,” he continues. “I would sometimes find information that was difficult for you to hear. I was really conscious of how I put things. A lot of these characters would say sexist humiliating things. Stevie, for example. He called Abby a pig. She was a pig that Brian Beat liked to fuck, he said. I think I left that out when I told you about Abby. I didn't know what to do—I didn't want to be patronizing. I didn't want to be paternalistic. But I wanted to protect you from hearing that.

“I could tell you didn't like Stevie. I knew that you didn't like him. I didn't want you to prevent me from going there. He gave us a lot of leads. We found out about Abby and Mary and all this stuff about him living on the Cape. I was most worried about the possibility that you might not want me to keep doing the work. I didn't want you to tell me not to go.”

“You're a born detective,” I tell him. Just like me, I think to myself. I recently recommended Jack for a part-time job at the FBI, and the special agent in charge is pleased with his work.

“Was this healing for you in any way?” I ask.

“This conversation is healing. I am glad we're talking. I was
confused. Sometimes you're really sweet to me…and then sometimes the other Jessica is there. I have experienced that before. It's really personal work,” he concludes.

Does he mean that the subject matter is personal? Or does he mean this sharing of what normally goes unsaid? I am not sure that Jack understands what he is telling me about himself and the reason he understands this zone thing.

“Did it feel like you're contributing to an understanding of PTSD?” I ask.

“It's relevant to my past,” he says, not really answering my question. “But until Jen pointed this out to me, I didn't realize it. Until then it was just work.”

 

Now I want to know why Paul Macone helped me. I want to believe that he helped me because he thought it was the right thing to do. But how can I be sure of anything these days? What if he had other motives?

I decide the best way to find out is to ask him.

I drive out to the station. At last, I am able to drive myself. But still, I feel that ghost of shame.

“I had to reopen the case because a guy like that could still be out there,” he says. I know this. He has told me this before. But it's not really what I want to know. I want to know why he continued to help me, even after we had identified the rapist and discovered he was dead.

One thing I fear is that he helped me because he knew Chet. Chet became a state representative at age twenty-one. He ran for office as a way to fulfill a college requirement. Then, astonishingly, he won, even though a Democrat had not won an election in our town since the Civil War. He was the youngest state rep ever elected. And then he became the head of the Democratic Party in the state. And then he became a state senator. And then
he headed up Ways and Means. And then he became a U.S. congressman. He lost his last election in 1992, in part because of his support of the Cambodian refugees who had moved into a town in his district, the same town where my father now teaches. Now he is in the private sector. But still. Maybe Paul was influenced by the fact that he knew Chet had political connections. Or maybe just because he knew Chet's family.

“No!” he insists. “I didn't know that Chet would be coming with you when I asked you to come in. I didn't know you two were involved when I decided to reopen the case.”

I want to believe this.

“How did you meet Chet?” I ask. He doesn't seem to understand that I'm trying to smoke him out.

“He was a little older than I. Somebody that everybody looked up to. He was friends with my brother,” Paul explains, smiling as he recalls. “The Atkinses, they were a well-thought-of family. You mention Chet Atkins. He's a somebody.”

“But Chet was…” He pauses, searching for the right word, still smiling. “He was a character. He once brought a live pig to school. Another time he brought a cow. He and my brother also managed to haul a car up to the roof of the high school. He was a well-known prankster. A character,” he repeats. Another time, Chet put bullfrogs in the girls' toilets.

I am mostly satisfied, having watched Paul's face during this recitation. He is not pretending that he didn't know that Chet was a “somebody,” which somehow makes his claim that he wasn't influenced by Chet's involvement more credible.

But I can't quite believe him yet.

“Why did you become a police officer?” I ask, trying to put the story into context.

“Lenny Weatherbee and I were old friends. [Lenny is now the chief of police.] We went to high school together. I was teaching shop at a special-needs school at the time. In Natick. I was teach
ing industrial arts,” he says. “Auto mechanics, photography, and machine shop.”

He sees that these words don't resonate with me. “All the things they taught us in the corner of the high school that you probably didn't go into.

“Lenny had just come onto the force. I used to see him here in Concord. One day, I remember we were at my girlfriend's house at the time. She's my wife now. He said to me, ‘Why don't you come on as a Special. It will be fun. We can ride around and be cops.'”

“What does it mean to be a Special?” I ask.

“It's a part-time job. They give you a gun.”

“Did you know how to shoot it?” I ask, astonished that a person trained to teach at a special-needs school would be allowed to work as a part-time cop. I have shifted into my interviewer mode, the shame shimmering, almost invisibly, in the distance now.

“Back then we had shooting in gym! Twenty-two-caliber rifles. Don't you remember?” he asks.

I don't. I do remember that they would let us out of gym if we were studying ballet, an enormous relief to me. Learning to shoot might have been more useful to me than ballet, as it turned out.

“You had to get a license to carry a weapon. I bought my own gun, a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber. You had to take a test in basic criminal law. We don't have Specials anymore,” he says. “Accreditation reasons. Liability reasons. This was 1978.

“So my friend was on the force. I thought, Why not? I wasn't married yet. I was still teaching, but you could do it at night. Lenny was a patrol officer. The lowest rank. We went out together in the cruiser.”

“Did you hang out at Brigham's?” I ask. In our small town, it always seemed that the cops spent most of their time drinking coffee. There was so little crime.

“We went to Friendly's,” he says. My heart sinks. There were only two places you could get coffee back then. Brigham's had better ice cream. Friendly's, I knew, had a pay phone that worked.

I've been in this station before, I am certain of this now. It was long ago. Paul doesn't seem to sense the aura of shame around me, or maybe he's just too polite to say. I've hidden this shame for so long, with security clearances and certificates and degrees.

“What sort of crimes did you have to deal with?” I ask, wondering how a teacher would know how to respond to a crime. (After all, I'm a teacher now, too).

Most of what you do in a small town like Concord is enforcement of motor vehicle laws, Paul tells me. There was the rare case of breaking and entering, he says. “Back then, on the weekends, kids were always having parties, and we'd have to tell them to be quiet. Sometimes they had parties in the woods. I remember one party at Ruggiero's Piggery. A lot of kids smoking pot and drinking.”