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Hannah said, “Come in. Please.”

She was starting to feel like some kind of professional hostess. Come in. Please. To my
life.

Teresa Delgado wore a white linen dress, and her hands, no rings,
held a small white leather purse. The girl Kelly, that’s how Teresa Delgado introduced her, without giving a last name, not that Hannah really cared, sat next to Teresa on the couch. The girl wore a denim skirt that showed off a lot of leg and a black tank top. Hannah didn’t meet a lot of girls her size, but this one sure was.

She reminded Hannah a little bit of herself at that age, which had to be seventeen or eighteen, tops.

“I apologize again for just showing up,” Teresa Delgado said, “but I felt it was time we all met. So I just came. I have a habit of doing this lately. First with Mr. Marty Perez, now with you.”

“You could have called,” Hannah said, not in a mean way, just telling her it would have been all right. “After reading the papers the other day, I almost called
you.
”

The girl didn’t say anything.

Hannah said, “I wouldn’t have turned you away is what I’m saying.”

“I am not a very confident person, even if some people think I am,” Teresa said. “I am better than I used to be. But still not so much, really, in the confidence department. I come from a culture where men are treated as gods by the women. These are tough habits to break. So I try to reduce my chances of rejection wherever possible.”

“Even with another woman who was—”

“Yes,” Teresa said, smiling at her, the smile making her pretty. “Even with such a woman as that.”

Hannah looked at the Seth Thomas wall clock behind the couch. If Brian Hyland was on time, and Hannah figured he’d be the type, whenever he said he was going to call at a certain time, he called on the dot, she had about half an hour for somebody to get to the point.

Hannah said, “You said we should talk.”

Teresa turned to the girl on the couch, the girl’s blond hair parted in the middle in that sixties style they all were starting to wear again. “Kelly is sixteen years old,” she said. “Just sixteen. She is a junior at Fulton High School.” She put a hand on the girl’s arm and said, “Why don’t you tell Hannah the rest.”

Sometimes you had to draw Hannah Carey a picture, but not now. Even Hannah, who was always a little slow on the uptake, knew what
was coming next. She said to the girl, Kelly, “He raped you, too, didn’t he?”

Without making a sound, without moving or changing expression, the girl started to cry, the tears just coming. Like it was a movie. What did they call them? Some kind of fake tears? Like somebody just applied them to Kelly’s cheeks.

“Yes,” the girl said.

Teresa said, “She read about me in the newspaper. It did not make as big an impression as when I was with Oprah the other day. She went back to the newspaper.” Teresa Delgado smiled. “They had not been recycled yet. She read the story again to find out that I am from Jersey City and got my number from information. I almost changed it, all the other television shows calling me up and offering me money.”

Teresa Delgado brought her small right hand up, made a fake slapping motion against her cheek. “Why am I telling you about television people? And these vulgar people from the movies?”

Vulgar? Hannah thought.

Kelly said, “I watch
Oprah
every day. You can find out some very cool things. I heard her start talking, and it was so awesome, and a little weird. She was talking about
exactly
what I wanted someone to be talking about. It’s like when you turn on QVC, you know? The shopping network? And you’ve been thinking about buying this one necklace or whatever, and there it
is
!”

“Anyway,” Teresa said, continuing, “I decided we should come here this morning. I thought it would be appropriate to form our own support group.”

“Support group,” Hannah echoed.

“It will be explained when you hear,” Teresa said.

“Why not the police?” Hannah said, and felt stupid as soon as she did.

“She is a girl,” Teresa Delgado said, taking a Kleenex from out of her purse and handing it to Kelly. “You are a woman.
I
am a woman. It took you a year to come forward, and it took me all these years.”

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, comfortable with that one, as always.

“Don’t be,” Teresa said. “Don’t be sorry. They always want us to be sorry. For something. For everything.” Softly she said, “Don’t they?”

Hannah said, “Yes.”

Teresa said, “When they don’t want us to be afraid anymore and they don’t want us to be guilty, they want us to be sorry. Are you a Catholic, Hannah?”

“No.”

“But you know of the Holy Trinity?”

“Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” Hannah said quickly. Was it still the Holy Ghost? Or was it the Holy Spirit? Hannah seemed to remember there had been some kind of change, she noticed it at a wedding one time.

“Well, there is a different Trinity for women like us, maybe all women,” Teresa said. “When we bless ourselves, genuflecting before men, it should be in the name of fear and then in the name of the guilt and finally in the name of being sorry. I was raped and you were raped and she was raped.”

Teresa Delgado was small, but she was a tough little bird.

“We are the ones violated,” Teresa said, picking up a little steam, “but as soon as that is over, we begin to violate ourselves. Violate our confidence. Our dignity. Our self-worth.”

Hannah couldn’t help thinking she should have had Teresa Delgado around when it was time to write her little speech at the Plaza. It was crazy, getting a thought like that. But there it was, once again like it was up on the screen. Hannah could see herself really bowling them over with words like Teresa’s.

Maybe when this was all over, she could have Teresa sit down with the screenwriter. Or meet Bob and Ken. Especially Bob. Just to show her they weren’t all vulgar …

She heard Teresa saying, “Hannah? I feel like I lost you there. Maybe it sounded like I was making a speech?”

“No,” Hannah said, “no, that’s not it at all. I was just thinking that you were saying things that are inside me, I just can’t ever find the right words for.”

“So you understand why Kelly did not go to her mother or her father or the police?”

Hannah said, “I don’t want to rush you, but there’s a Fulton policeman coming here in a few minutes to talk about Richie Collins.”

Kelly turned to Teresa, eyes wide.

“No!” she said, a gasp, really. “My father knows every policeman in that town. They’ll
tell
!”

Teresa Delgado said, “We will be gone before he comes, do not worry. But since I think we are going to be friends here, maybe you should tell Hannah who your father is.”

The girl said, “Frank Crittendon. You know who he is, right?”

Hannah, trying not to act floored, said, “The general manager of the Knicks.”

“As you can see, it is a problem,” Teresa Delgado said. “But not as big as the other.”

Now Hannah felt like someone had to draw her a picture.

Kelly Crittendon sighed. “Teresa says I can tell. So here goes.” She looked at Teresa, who smiled and nodded, like, go ahead. “Richie raped me Monday afternoon.”

Hannah said, “This Monday—?”

“This Monday,” Teresa Delgado said.

“Jesus Christ,” Hannah Carey said.

“Pray for us,” Teresa Delgado said.

Teresa told Kelly to tell it the same way she had at breakfast.

Kelly Crittendon said she felt like she had known Richie Collins her whole life. “Even if it was only half.”

She had always looked older than her real age. Been bigger than the other girls. The first to get a chest. She was a tomboy, ball-girling for the Knicks in training camp from the time she was twelve.

Richie noticed her even then.

The guys at school, they never noticed her.

Kelly said, “We all knew my dad wanted a boy. I mean, Mom she’s, like, even taller than me, when you put her next to Dad, they look sillier together than Billy Joel and Christie looked before, you know, they split up. She jokes all the time that Dad only married her so they could breed a shooting guard. So it’s like I was always expected to not just do boy things, but like them. You know? But my secret was, I only did the stuff to be
around
boys. Like: I was noticing
them way before they were noticing me. Wanting them to notice me in the worst way. But nobody did. Till Richie.”

By the time she was in her teens, he flirted with her constantly. The October before this one—my October with the Knicks, Hannah thought—he had her start calling him “Uncle Rich.” That was for her father’s benefit.

It had reached the point, though, where both Richie and Kelly knew he wanted to be more than her uncle. And she wanted the same thing.

She started thinking about him all the time, all during that season. She couldn’t go to all the games; they finished up too late and her father usually had something to do afterward, some meeting with the coach or a late dinner in the city that wouldn’t even start until around midnight. Sometimes he’d even stay over at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where the team rested up in the afternoons before home games.

So she didn’t come too much, but when she did, it wasn’t about seeing the games. Just Richie Collins. After the game, she’d wait an hour in the hall, like she was waiting for Frank Crittendon to collect her. But she was waiting to say hello to “Uncle Rich,” have him give her a little kiss on the cheek, nobody noticing the squeeze he’d sometimes give her, too.

On game nights, she said, then laughed and said most of the time her father was in a world of his own, so he didn’t notice the clothes she’d wear to the games, clothes that didn’t just get looks from Richie Collins, but all the players after a while.

Only Richie, though, looked at her the way you look at something you can
have
, Kelly Crittendon said.

She said, “ ‘One of these days, little girl,’ he’d say. And I’d go, ‘One of these days
what
?’ And he’d go, ‘One of these days, you’re going to have to fight me off.’ ”

Out of nowhere, she started to cry again. Hannah just sat there, not knowing what to do for her. Teresa Delgado took out another Kleenex, wiped Kelly Crittendon’s tears herself this time, saying, “He never changed.”

Then she added, “Until he died.”

Six months before, in the spring, before the Knicks’ last regular
season game, Kelly had told her father she would meet him at the game, just leave her ticket for her; she’d take the train in from Fulton, where Frank Crittendon had bought his dream house. It was a Saturday. Kelly took the train, got a cab at Grand Central, and took it to the Regency, arriving there right after the Knicks’ morning practice. Getting his room number had been easy. Her father was a meticulous man, “a real fuddy-duddy about detail stuff.” There was always an itinerary in his briefcase.

She wore what she would wear to the game: this cool hot-yellow shirt over black tights. Heels.

She had waited as long as she could.

She had convinced herself that Richie Collins—ten years older? more? so what, ten years was nothing—wanted her as much as she wanted him. She was sure that he sensed this thing that had been growing between them. So Kelly did what she had been dreaming about doing for more than a year, a year that seemed like fifteen lifetimes to a fifteen-year-old: She knocked on Richie Collins’s door.

Kelly: “I was on the pill. I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I’d, well, like I’d practiced doing it with this guy Kenny, the best player on the Fulton basketball team. All my life, I’d heard Daddy and everybody else make
practicing
something sound like a sacrament. I figured I’d better practice sex, too, if I didn’t want to look like a jerk.”

Looking at Hannah and Teresa for approval.

Teresa Delgado said, “We are willing to do anything for them.”

Hannah jumped in for the first time, surprising herself. She said, “Anything and everything,” not thinking about Teresa or this girl, knowing she was talking about herself.

Teresa said, “We want to make them happy and
so
proud.”

Richie wasn’t even surprised to see her, Kelly said. Or if he was surprised, he was too cool, too grown-up, to show it.

He had a suite.

Kelly: “We didn’t even make it to the living room. I could see this big fruit basket in there, the biggest I’d ever seen. But we did it right there. Standing up.”

Her eyes got very big, and Hannah thought she might cry again.

Kelly: “It wasn’t … I had thought about how it would be all different from this. But I didn’t even get a chance to take my blouse
off. Richie just kept saying we’d waited long enough. He said he
needed
me. Need you, baby. Need you, baby. I think back, and that’s all I can remember him saying.”

After that first time, they decided it was too risky to meet at the hotel, especially with the play-offs coming up and the whole city turning up the lights on the Knicks. So they began meeting at his apartment.

Then, way too soon for Kelly, so soon she couldn’t believe it, the season was over. The whole rest of her life, she said, the season seemed to go on forever.

Now she would have done anything to get another month.

Frank Crittendon, after taking care of the NBA draft, took his family to their summer home on Cape Cod. Richie Collins, because of his sneaker contract, went off to conduct basketball clinics in Europe and Asia. Promising to see Kelly in September.

Kelly: “He asked me if I’d ever heard of that song ‘See You in September.’ He said it was like him. I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘An oldie but a goodie.’ He said the song was from way back there in the fifties.”

Teresa gave out this little gasp. “He told me the same thing that summer,” she said. “About that same song.” Hannah noticed it was the first time she had heard an accent from her,
told
sounding like
toll
, like she was talking about paying a toll.

When training camp started, Richie and Kelly started up again. It still seemed so reckless to her, so wicked, sneaking around right under her father’s nose. She knew he would kill her if he found out. “Kill me and then kill Richie,” she said.