A Secret Rage Page 7

  Because of our lavish cooking I gained four pounds, which Mimi swore became me. I thought I looked like I’d swallowed a cantaloupe.

  Attila became quite possessive. He cuffed Mao un-mercifully when the smaller cat ventured too close to me. I grew used to studying with a heavy load of tabby on my lap. When I was alone, I discussed things with Attila in disgusting baby talk. Mimi overheard me a couple of times and made graphic gagging noises.

  Occasionally I heard from New York friends. Their phone calls seemed like communications from a foreign land. I was sliding back into my own. My speaking cadence slowed. I didn’t wear camouflage on the street. My manners resumed their former polish. My way of thinking reverted (a little) to the labyrinthine.

  But mostly I studied. I had to. If I wasn’t reading, I was writing: not the novels of my dreams, but essays and term papers of one kind or another.

  I dated a friend of Charles’s once or twice. He was nothing worth working at, just good for a mildly pleasant evening; for one thing, he talked about duck hunting too much. But our double dates gave me a chance to observe Mimi with Charles. To my relief, she showed distinct signs of finally having developed a streak of caution and a sense of her own rights.

  Sometimes she sang in a fair-to-middling alto as she got ready for a date, and sometimes she had that exalted, melted, ‘in love’ look. But more often she seemed thoughtful. I was glad to see that; I hadn’t brought myself to like Charles yet though I was trying. And I did not, repeat did not, criticize him to Mimi. But perhaps she sensed my anxiety. He was courting her at such a furious clip that I’d become semiseriously concerned about finding another place to live in Knolls, in case Charles really did succeed in sweeping her off her feet and to the justice of the peace. Housing in Knolls was no idle concern. Because of the shortage of dormitory space, every doghouse and garage in town was rented during the college year. Barbara Tucker had had an awful time finding a place to live after she got raped. She just hadn’t been able to stand her garage apartment any longer.

  Poor Barbara. She was the only specter on a horizon I found full of promise, and she was becoming a very faint wraith. I was truly busy, desperately busy; and the tiny tremor in her voice reminded me that I should, must, treat her specially. She was of the walking wounded. She marched down the sidewalks of Houghton very swiftly, and very alone. Stan’s defection had proved permanent. From a comment she dropped during one of our rare meetings, I got the idea she was seeing Cully professionally, and I hoped my surmise was correct. Cully’s calm, restraint and precision would be comforting to a woman in Barbara’s situation, I thought.

  Talk about Barbara’s rape was no longer current in Knolls, partly because neither Heidi Edmonds (the first victim) nor Barbara had ever been figures in the mainstream of town life. According to Mimi, the feeling prevailed that the rapes were a campus problem – though plenty of residents strolled through the gardens, and of course Barbara’s rape had happened off-campus. The scare had hit hard only among faculty wives and town women who worked at the college. These women watched what went on around them more carefully, and many installed extra locks. The female students went in pairs after dark, at least while the fear was fresh.

  Mimi and I were conscientious about locking the doors every night and I tried to do all my library work before I came home to supper. We decided we were doing everything we reasonably could to make ourselves safe. I distinctly remember the phrase ‘fortress mentality’ coming into our conversation when we discussed security measures.

  On the whole, this was a pleasant and rewarding period in my life. I loved it. I was living in a place I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, spending time with a friend I cherished. I was slowly making more friends. The ladder was gone; I didn’t have to climb it, or scrabble to keep my place on it anymore. I seldom turned on the bulbs of my mirror for that dark close examination.

  Late October had never seemed so full of golden light.

  7

  I WAS JERKED OUT of sleep so suddenly and violently that the shock robbed me of breath. A hand was clamped over my mouth. If I had had any air, I would have screamed.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ whispered the figure that was only a darker part of the darkness filling the room.

  That figure was not Mimi or Cully or anyone who had a right to be there. In the worst moment of my life I knew clearly what was going to happen.

  I couldn’t breathe, I had to breathe. I lifted my hand to knock his away, let me breathe!

  ‘Don’t move, I have a knife,’ he whispered.

  He held it up into a shaft of moonlight he was careful not to cross. I saw the blade, as he wanted me to.

  Oh my God I’m going to die.

  And I imagined the blood soaking the sheets, and God bless Mimi, she would find me. I was going to die and I wanted to live.

  My heart was pounding so erratically and loudly that I feared a heart attack, too – fear was going to kill me, fear and the knife, fear or the knife. This was my end; this secret dark and hideous incubus was going to end Nickie Callahan, and my God I couldn’t breathe.

  There was hate filling the darkness around me, hate trickling down that shaft of moonlight. I was sick from the hate and the fear.

  He moved his hand and I gasped air, air, oh Jesus, let me live! The hand had risen to gain impetus for the smashing blow it delivered to the side of my face. I choked on blood and pain.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he warned me, and then he hit me again. And again.

  Sometime before the fifth blow I was still conscious enough to begin to hate, for my hate to match his; conscious enough to want his death for the death he was dealing me.

  I heard the ordinary sound of a zipper rasping.

  He put the extra pillow over my face and he raped me.

  I twisted my head to one side under the pillow’s smothering pressure and breathed wonderful air for the minutes I had left. My arms were locked protectively across my chest. I could feel his head brushing them. I wrenched my mind away from my body. I loathed the thing that lay on me. What was happening bore no relation to anything I’d experienced before. This was not sex but punishment. He hated me. He was going to kill me. And I couldn’t move to defend myself. If I moved I would surely die, and there was a chance, some kind of chance, there had to be . . . a chance that I would live . . . if I stayed still.

  The incubus owned my life.

  Where was the knife? Somewhere it was waiting to slide into me, between my ribs, ripping me, violating me in another way. Both his hands were occupied (don’t feel, Nickie), the knife must be somewhere in the tangle of sheets.

  But I couldn’t move to find it.

  My heart pounded erratically, on and on, frantically wanting an end to this. I knew the end would be soon.

  Then it was over. He was off me, and I heard a fumbling in the dark as he zipped up his pants. My silent screams had compounded into such a noise inside me that I could barely hear the things he was whispering. I was glad of that. I had reached the bottom of humiliation and helplessness.

  He hit me again, body blows now; over and over, and I thought it would maybe be better if he went on and used the knife. The fear would be over, the pain would end. I was going to die soon. There was no chance of my living. I could feel that rage, taste it in the blood in my mouth – my rage and his. He surely wouldn’t let me survive to hate him this much.

  He bent to my ear, bent to the air gap under the pillow. ‘I might come back, you superior bitch,’ he whispered. ‘Think about that. I might come back.’

  I suddenly realized that he meant to leave me alive this time – alive. This bastard was going to permit me to live; and I hated him, it throbbed in the blood pumped by my exhausted heart.

  ‘Don’t move, or I’ll kill you, Nickie,’ he whispered again. ‘Do you understand?’

  I nodded somehow; he must have seen the pillow shift. Then a funny sound. It came to me that I was hearing gloves sliding onto hands.

  A final ‘Don’t move.
’ I felt a stir in the air.

  I was going to live.

  He was leaving.

  If I had gotten up, and to the window, perhaps I could finally have seen him. I couldn’t move. Nothing could get me off that bed. My muscles were locked, and fear was still shrieking through my veins and arteries.

  I had survived.

  I stared into the darkness from under the pillow wet with my blood – but not my lifeblood. The fact that I was going to live filled the universe under that pillow.

  But he might come back even now. I sensed he was gone; but he might be back, he might be just in the next room. Had he meant immediately? Or had he meant some night in the future?

  Oh God I can’t stand it if he comes back. I can’t survive it again.

  There was not such a thing as time. There was only breath after breath, one more breath that I had lived, then another . . . In. Out. Not dead, I’m not dead, alive alive alive. In. Out.

  There came a breath when I was convinced he was gone.

  In one convulsive shove I threw the pillow from my face and the chilly night touched my face. I stared into the dark corners of the room. Even the shaft of moonlight had vanished, covered by clouds.

  It was really over. It had really happened. I smelled of it, to my sick disgust. I had lived through it. And I had to have help. I managed to roll. I stretched my arm. I found the switch on my bedside lamp.

  Light. Blessed light, emptying the room of shadows that might hold him. He was truly gone; I would truly live. I was filled with an intense shock of astonishment.

  Now. If I could get up. I looked down at my body and shuddered, feeling more naked than I had thought it possible to feel. There was damage. He must have worn a ring; maybe he’d put one on especially to cause more damage. I felt as sorry for my body as if it were a separate thing, not a part of me. My mind pitied my body for what had happened to it. It had to be covered, poor bleeding raped thing. I had to reach the closet to cover up that bruised body. I didn’t want it to be naked anymore, ever.

  But the closet was a few feet away. Need drove me. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, bringing them together in a tight protective parallel. Holding on to the bed table, I stood. I swayed for a second and caught myself. I shuffled forward, my knees trembling, and turned the handle of the doorknob. Opened the closet. My robe, my winter robe, the long one that closed up to the neck, that had a sash that I could tie tightly; that was what I wanted. It took me a long time to find that robe and get it on. I had to rest before I started for the hall. If my knees would just stiffen; come on, please, legs.

  Raped. Oh Jesus God, raped.

  I hadn’t left the door to the hall closed when I went to bed. It was closed now. I opened it with infinite effort. It swung in silently, disclosing the blackness of the stairs and hallway.

  And I wondered if Mimi was still alive.

  The terror started all over again. My hand independently found a switch and pushed it up. The stairs leaped into light. Attila was huddled in a mass of wild-eyed panic on the landing. His tail twitched as he stared down at me. I couldn’t climb the stairs; I tried to lift my foot to the first step, and failed.

  ‘Mimi,’ I whispered. Louder, Nick, I told myself.

  ‘Mimi,’ I said raggedly in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own. I felt fluid running down my thighs. I gagged.

  Then I screamed, ‘MIMI!’

  An uncertain sound upstairs. Then a whole series of little thumps, a door opening. Attila turned his crazed eyes upward.

  Alive and unhurt, Mimi appeared at the head of the stairway, buttoning her bathrobe. She stopped on the landing when she saw me. I stared up at her.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said quietly. She brought her hands up to cover her mouth. ‘Not – oh, Nickie. Not you.’

  The tears that started down her cheeks ran over her hands. She jumped when she felt the wetness, dropped her hands to grip the banister, and crept down the stairs to me, hand over hand on the wood, like an old crippled woman. When she was level with me she looked at my face, into my eyes, and shuddered. I didn’t feel anything, anything at all. I knew that would end, soon. And there was a lot to do before it ended.

  ‘Call the police,’ I mumbled. Something was going wrong with my mouth. My knees gave way and I sat on the stairs. ‘Call them right now.’

  She moved past me. The cat streaked past her heels, mad with all this abnormality, wanting out. Away. I huddled close to the banister and crossed my arms over my breasts, pressing the bathrobe more tightly around me. I could feel blood moving down my cheek and couldn’t – wouldn’t – lift a finger to stop the ooze. I focused on the front door, directly across the expanse of living room from me. Soon a lot of people would be coming through that door. I dreaded the unknown process that was about to be set in motion; I dreaded the questions; I dreaded, most of all, the faces.

  But my hate matched his. No matter what it cost me, I would endure anything to catch the man who had done this to me. Before the pain blurred my thoughts, I realized, with an eerie clarity, that nothing I had ever done in my life – nothing – could justify the punishment that had been meted out to me.

  * * * *

  It didn’t hurt my cause that the house I lived in was Mimi Houghton’s; that I was white; and that I had visible wounds to show. Even so, I was surprised by the Knolls police department. They were neither naive nor inefficient. The first car arrived within two minutes of Mimi’s call. These were patrolmen. After a quick question as to whether I needed an ambulance, they began to search the house and the block. Then came the detectives, two grave middle-aged men in sports clothes with faces like road maps of unpleasant scenery.

  They held some kind of colloquy with Mimi, and she vanished into my bedroom. When she returned, she squatted in front of me and took my hands.

  ‘Come with me for a second, Nickie. Can you get up?’

  Confused, but not caring enough to ask any questions, I let her lead me to the empty room across from my bedroom. She had a pair of underwear balled up in a bathrobe pocket.

  ‘Honey, you have to put these on, okay? They’re going to have to keep them and send them in to the lab.’

  I had to lean against the wall while Mimi tugged them on. She saw my torso. She had to sit down for a second, and she sobbed, deep racking gusts of air. I stood propped against the wall and observed her.

  She got up after a minute. ‘Now, we’re going to have to go outside, but the police will be with us,’ she said unevenly. She put her arm around me and I leaned against her, my own arms still crossed over my chest. One of the detectives came to my side as we crept through the living room and out the front door.

  ‘We’re going to see my doctor,’ Mimi explained carefully as they maneuvered me into a strange car. ‘For the evidence, and because you’re hurt, okay?’

  I nodded. If I had tried to speak, I would have started screaming and never stopped.

  The examination I had to endure, I did endure. I clenched my teeth while the doctor treated the cuts and clucked over the forming bruises, then told me I had no broken bones and only two loose teeth, which was some kind of miracle. The doctor recommended a visit to an optometrist to have my eyes checked, told me I’d have one shiner, and then got out some kind of kit to collect evidence for the police.

  In a nervous effort to make small talk, to fill the silence as I stared at him, he explained that he’d examined the student, Heidi Edmonds, the past summer; and also Barbara Tucker two months ago. The police had supplied him with some kits in case the rapist struck again. He’d gone to a training school, he told me, to learn how to use them.

  I had a horrible vision of myself posing for an ad for rape evidence kits, an ad designed for some law-enforcement journal. I would be posed holding one and smiling, sitting on the examining table with an avuncular doctor patting me on the back. A stern and determined policeman would be visible through a partially open door into the hall.

  I suddenly realized I was still in my bathrobe. Mim
i was somehow in blue jeans, though I’d never been aware of her leaving my side to dress.

  The doctor told me it wasn’t necessary for me to go to the hospital, but if I wanted to check in for a couple of days of observation, that might be best.

  ‘No.’ I would not have more people staring.

  While I lay on my back on the cold examining table, I spied a clock on the wall. I realized, with a jolt, that it registered four o’clock in the morning. When had I been awakened by that hand over my mouth? I’d gone to bed around ten-thirty. Mimi had been out with Charles Seward; I vaguely remembered hearing her come in, but I had no idea of the hour. I’d gone straight back to sleep.

  By the time the doctor had finished, the night was thinning toward dawn. We rode back in the detectives’ car. We walked into the house to face more activity than we’d left. I saw men in my bedroom, dusting for prints. For the first time, I noticed that the screen was not on the window I’d left ajar when I went to bed – a window that looked out onto the encircling porch.

  That must be how the man had entered my bedroom. It had not occurred to me to wonder before. While I was sleeping, in my own bed in my own home, he had stood there watching me through the window and then carefully removed that screen and entered.

  I had thought I could sleep with an open window on a cool fall night. Despite Heidi Edmonds, despite Barbara Tucker.

  There it was, the thing I was guilty of: I’d left a window open. I stood convicted of not fearing enough.

  ‘There have been two rapes,’ I said informatively to the detective helping me get to the couch.

  He jumped. It was the first time I’d spoken since the doctor’s. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Maybe more. Some women won’t call us, you know.’

  ‘Is this the same rapist?’

  ‘After we’ve talked to you some more, we’ll have a better idea. Oh – later we’ll need your bathrobe, too, Miss Callahan. I’m sorry.’

  That was okay with me. I never wanted to see it again after this night was over.

  Their questions had been few and brief so far, only aimed at determining how close the rapist might still be to the house. They’d decided right away that a doctor had to come first.