The list of pregnant thoughts was one of the first things he dug out of a box when we moved. They were always funny the morning after, and it kept the other list company—the one scribbled with possible baby names. Over the years, that list got shorter. Mike didn’t know, but I had named each baby we lost.
“So where do things stand with Caroline’s case?”
“I’m wondering whether I overreacted. Wondering whether I’m reacting enough. Feeling my way through small-town politics. By the way, Harry and his wife would like to meet for dinner tomorrow night. At Ruggieri’s. About seven.”
“Harry …?”
“Mayor Harry Dunn. As in the mayor. My boss. You met his wife at Caroline’s.”
Letty
. I didn’t want to think about two hours of spaghetti twirling with a former pageant queen who was probably on board with the Confederate flag license plate. I swiftly changed the subject. “I saw Dr. Liesel today. You know, the woman at the party who was recommended as a good local OBGYN.”
“Why? I thought you just had a checkup in Dallas. Did she look at the baby?”
“Yes, we heard the heartbeat. I’m fine. The baby’s fine. I was having a little intestinal distress. I’m trying to tell you something else.”
Mike eyed me carefully. He knew about more than a few paranoid trips to the doctor, some that made me feel embarrassed and neurotic and others that painfully assured me I wasn’t. He tossed his tray and apple core in the trash and walked over to where I was standing near the window in the fading light.
“I’m glad everything’s OK,” he said softly. He didn’t wait for me to speak. “That light, that blue shirt … you look like the Madonna. I’d paint you right now if I knew how to paint with something other than a roller. Maybe you should look in a mirror and paint yourself. You have to be the most beautiful pregnant woman ever.”
He bent over to nuzzle my neck and to feel up the C cups.
“I have some things to tell you … about what Dr. Liesel said … and … other things.” I leaned back into him, distracted by Mike’s roving hands and mouth and liking it enough to not make him stop.
He paused. “Didn’t you tell me everything is fine with the baby?”
“It’s not about that.”
“Can we still have sex?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s take this discussion to the bedroom.”
T
his was it.
This was the moment I should tell him. When he felt the most in love with me, after his last shudder, while we spooned, my padded body snug against his muscles, his arm curved around my belly protectively.
The safest place in the world for me to tell.
Our lovemaking had been especially simple and intimate tonight. Not a lot of foreplay. Our faces so close that I could feel his breath, his eyes locked to mine, blue to green, for each slow and deliberate thrust. A good, sweet hurt inside, like when a masseuse’s hands find the right spot.
Mike came quickly. I didn’t.
I didn’t want to.
I turned over, squeezing my eyes shut, preparing myself, thinking that every moment after this one could be different.
“I was raped in college.” A rush of words. A whisper buried in my pillow, too low for him to hear. Nothing like I planned. No easing in. No waiting for his body to recover.
I said it again, too loud this time. The word
raped
cracked the air, a gunshot across the water. His arm around me loosened a little. Retreat? I was flooded with instant regret.
Two seconds had passed. Now three. Enough time for an Olympic runner to cross the finish line well ahead of everyone else. My body began to shake, like it might explode. Mike was pulling me to his chest.
“It’s OK,” he said urgently. “It’s OK.”
Sobbing, I clutched his arms around my belly. When I squeezed my eyes closed, I spiraled in a black universe. Mike said things, soothing things that I didn’t hear for all the noise in my head.
After a time, my breathing grew less ragged. The spinning carousel slowed.
“Emily?” Tentative.
Nothing came out of my mouth, even though I willed myself to speak, and my body to stop trembling. I tried to identify the one emotion that hadn’t been wrenched out of my gut. I felt relief. But not healed. I wanted desperately to feel
healed
.
“I’ve always suspected something like this.”
I swallowed a hard rock in my throat. “You aren’t mad?”
“Why in God’s name would I ever be mad at you for this? I’d like to kill the guy.”
I didn’t say anything. Mike didn’t make empty threats. The last thing I wanted was for him to go hunting.
“There were signs.” Mike shook his head. “I saw them. Marguerite saw them. She said not to push you. That it would happen. That you were almost ready. Because you loved me … and wanted to change. You wanted
us
to change.”
Marguerite, our last therapist, our
best
therapist, a University of Chicago Ph.D., the only professional who told me with unwavering faith in her Supreme Being never to be afraid to try again. She was only in her late twenties, but she knew about losing things. She’d grown old on the streets of Detroit before she was sixteen. She had told us that much. She didn’t say that she’d been raped in that city of decay. But I knew.
“I don’t think I can live without you,” I whispered.
“Why in hell would you ever have to?” He arranged a few pillows on the headboard and patted the space nearby. Familiar territory. I scooted up and leaned my back against his stomach,
staring at a pattern of nail holes in the wall, at the three oval shadows in the paint left behind by a set of framed vintage flower prints. Now the orchids were permanently gone, and so was the old lady who hung them.
Words stumbled out of my mouth. I told Mike excruciating, inane details, like the empty Domino’s pizza box sitting on the floor of Pierce’s dorm room. I avoided dragging him along razor-sharp wounds, like how there was another person in the room. Mike didn’t seem to need any more than I was willing to say, murmuring encouragement, never interrupting.
Not until I mentioned the package.
“Someone sent the rape report here?” he barked, rolling away. “You don’t know where it came from? Where the hell is it?”
“In my purse. On the dresser.”
He jerked himself off the bed, and I immediately felt a chill, the moment disintegrating. Zero to sixty, tender to tense, in a split second. Our pattern.
“How the hell can you find anything in here?” Mike was back on the edge of the bed, pulling things out of my purse recklessly: loose coins, lipstick, my wallet, receipts. Dumping it all onto the tangled sheets. No woman can bear this kind of invasion of her purse, especially when it’s a nuclear disaster inside, even when it holds no secrets.
“Mike, calm down. Stop. Please.”
I grabbed the purse from him and opened the zipper compartment. The crumpled sheet was now smoothed, folded in half twice.
“You wadded this up? Were you not going to show it to me?” His voice held disbelief. “Never mind.”
He read quickly down the page, detached, professional, not the lover who had moments ago curved his hand around my breast.
“This cop, if you can call her that, should be shot like a dog. I don’t like this, Emily. Did you ever think this could be from him?”
“No,” I said, truthfully, thinking I didn’t like that expression.
Shot like a dog
. Any rabid dog was better than the man who raped me.
“Frat-boy rapists like him don’t stop at one.”
No
, I thought.
They marry shy little wives who homeschool their kids, they go to church every Sunday, rail against homosexuals, and continue their sexual perversions on the side
. I closed my eyes and pictured a Christmas card photo with Pierce and an imaginary family: a lovely wife and two sweet-faced children posed with him in front of a simulated forest, everyone wearing forced smiles and coordinating black shirts and worn jeans. Trying too hard.
The pitch of Mike’s voice was rising, the cadence more and more frenetic. “A friend of mine who works sex crimes calls date rape ‘the last frontier of crime.’ Women won’t report. If they do, juries don’t like them because they are traumatized and look guilty because they
feel
guilty and can only paint a picture of fragments. But the rapist, he isn’t confused at all up there on the stand. He’s not feeling guilty. He’s got the whole picture. He
drew
the fucking picture.” Mike dropped back onto the bed, resting a hand on my leg. “I shouldn’t even call him a frat-boy rapist. He’s a serial predator. A planner. These guys operate in their social network, careful not to leave marks, assessing targets less likely to tell. You know that he
planned
to rape you that night? Maybe for weeks.”
Mike was making a noble speech in our bedroom, rushing to fill the space with his experience, with facts, to attach some kind of sense and reason to something that couldn’t be tacked down by either one. He was meaning to make it less, not more. But his ferocity and the cold, antiseptic words flying out of his mouth—
target
and
predator
and
social network
—only broke loose more pieces of that night.
The cloying odor of Pierce’s shampoo. My first, absurd thought when he flipped me over.
He’s not going to marry me
. The sting as
my roommate dabbed alcohol along the path where his fingernail had raked my leg.
It was almost unbearable, the pain and guilt I felt for that naïve, humiliated girl. But Mike was trying so hard. I couldn’t let him know he was making it worse.
“I don’t think that Pierce Martin sent this.” I hadn’t spoken his name out loud in thirteen years. He was like a roach crawling out of a sink drain.
“Where’s the envelope?”
“In the kitchen trash.” He grabbed his boxers off the floor and pulled them on. I swiped at his arm but too late. “Wait. Mike.”
Already, I could hear him tossing the kitchen trashcan, slamming a drawer shut that was in the way, silverware rattling. It didn’t take long, but long enough for me to urge my heart rate slower.
“This it?” He stood in the doorway in old blue boxers, holding a piece of paper, red-faced and half-naked, and it struck me not for the first time how there was never a moment that he looked vulnerable.
I nodded and spoke quickly, hoping to diffuse things. “I keep thinking … this might be Caroline’s work. Mike, where are you going?”
Let me tell you about the box, dammit. About a club of pretty Texas vipers entwined by their ugly secrets
.
“To take a shower.” His response was brusque. “Then to work for a while. To butt in.”
When Mike reappeared, he was dressed in his new uniform of crisp khakis and a dark blue polo shirt with
CLAIRMONT POLICE DEPT
. embroidered over the pocket. He strapped on the gun lying on his bedside table before leaning in to simultaneously brush my forehead with his lips and run a swift hand over my belly, always part of the goodbye now, like rubbing a Buddha for
luck. But it was the tiny Buddha inside me who needed all the luck he could get.
He turned at the door and spoke gruffly. “You good?”
This was typical of Mike, to acknowledge as he was walking out the door that we’d just experienced something of a breakthrough.
“I’m fine. Really. Thank you.” This was typical of me, not asking him to please hang around.
I knew the uselessness of telling Mike in this mood that it was too late to go back to work—8:13 p.m., by my clock radio—so I lay back on the bed listening for the front door to click shut, to hear his key locking it from the outside. I wondered what he planned to do with the police report, whether he would search for Pierce Martin and find out the rest. Untie the ribbons of my secrets all by himself.
The brittle ring of the phone interrupted.
I couldn’t think of anyone on earth I felt like talking to. Reluctantly, I picked up the receiver on the bedside table. Something was screwy with our caller ID because of the old telephone lines in the house, but Mike insisted I answer the landline no matter what. He didn’t like when he couldn’t reach me, which he declared was half the time lately. The pregnant me forgot to charge my cell phone, left it in the car console or buried in the chair cushions, turned off the sound.
“Hello.”
Nothing.
“Hello? Who is this?”
I felt a presence on the other end, waiting me out. The thick silence spun me back to a phone call in college, months before I even knew Pierce Martin’s name. The caller had paused his rapid breathing long enough to whisper that he was watching me through the bare window of my basement apartment. The cops who showed up ten minutes later assured me that the caller was
some gutless wonder lying in his own bed, jerking off. But, I always wondered, how did he know I had no curtains?
Anger at Mike surged, for leaving me alone and not letting me finish. I sat there in my nightgown, slick with sweat and tears, gripping the phone and willing the intruder in my bedroom to hang up first.
I won.
I
woke up, sitting ramrod straight, staring at the face of a frightened, wild-eyed woman.
It took a moment to realize that the woman terrifying me
was
me.
My eyes were locked on a murky reflection in the mirror leaning against the wall on top of the dresser. The white moon of Mike’s head rose beside me in the glass before his arms pulled me down into a warm embrace. He had slipped back into bed around 1 a.m.
“The dream again?” he asked, half-awake. “The little girl?” And then he promptly started snoring.
“Yes. The dream.” I snuggled tighter into his arms even though my body was steaming, soaked with perspiration.
“The little girl,” I said.
The little girl in my dream stands on top of a steep hill. Her expression is solemn. An ancient stone church looms behind her with dozens of pointy turrets rising like thick, sharpened pencils against the clouds. I can see every detail of her face and every microscopic blade of grass on that hill in high definition, a magic trick of dreamland. After the third miscarriage, Mike had made me bring her up in one of our marriage counseling sessions with a woman whose name wasn’t Marguerite.