A week before Thanksgiving 1983, the poet Robert Ely gave a reading in the auditorium of the Hall of Languages. I was anxious to see him, having greedily read his poems at the urging of both Tess and Hayden Carruth. Lila was at home studying for the kind of killer test that, as a poetry major, I no longer had to concern myself with. Pat had gone to study in Bird Library.
Tess and Hayden were both in attendance. So were the department heads. Ely was a big-name poet and the room was packed. I sat in the middle of the small auditorium. My friend Chris had graduated the year before and so now I attended readings solo. Twenty minutes into the reading, I felt sharp, stabbing pains in my abdomen. I looked at my digital watch. It was 8:56 P.M.
I considered toughing it out, but the pains were too intense. My stomach was cramping. At the end of a poem, I stood and noisily made my way between people's knees and the back of the row of seats in front of me.
Out in the hall, I called Marc. He had a car. I told him to meet me at Bird Library. I was too sick to take the bus home, I had used the same phone two years before to call my parents, but I had scrupulously avoided it since then. That night I failed to honor superstition.
Marc had to take a shower. "Twenty minutes at most," he said.
"I'll be the one cleaving to my abdomen," I tried to joke. "Try to hurry."
As I waited outside Bird, I began to tense up even more. Something was wrong but I had no idea what it was.
Finally, after forty minutes, Marc pulled up. We drove off campus and up Euclid, where many students lived in run-down wooden houses.
We turned the corner onto my street. Up at the end of the block, where Lila and I lived, were five black-and-whites with their lights going. The policemen were out running around, talking to people.
I knew.
"Oh my God, oh my God," I started saying. "Let me out, let me out."
Marc was flustered. "Let me park, let me go with you."
"No, let me out, now."
He drove into a driveway and I got out. I didn't wait for him. All the lights were on in our building. Our front door was open. I walked right in.
Two uniformed policemen stopped me in the small foyer.
"This is a crime scene. You'll have to leave."
"I live here," I said. "Is it Lila? What happened? Please."
Involuntarily I started peeling off the layers of my clothing and letting them fall on the floor. My winter hat, my scarf, my gloves, jacket, and down vest. I was frantic.
In our living room, there were more cops. One of the uniforms made a gesture to someone there and began, "She says she lives-"
"Alice?" the plainclothes detective said.
I recognized him instantly.
"Sergeant Clapper?"
When I said his name, the uniforms ceased restraining me.
"It's Detective Clapper now," he said, smiling. "What are you doing here?"
"I live here," I said. "Where's Lila?"
His face fell. "I'm so sorry," he said.
I noticed the policemen looking at me differently than before. Marc entered the apartment. I told the uniforms he was my boyfriend.
"Alice Sebold?" one of them asked.
I turned back to Clapper. "Was she raped?"
"Yes," he said. "On the bed in the back bedroom."
"That's my room," I said. "Is she okay?"
"The female detective's in with her now. We need to have her examined at the hospital. You can drive with us in the car. She didn't struggle."
I asked to see her. Clapper said, "Of course," and went back to inform Lila I was there.
I stood there, feeling the eyes of the uniformed policemen on me. They knew my case because it had been one of the few convictions in a rape case in recent years. In their world, my case was famous. It had brought Clapper up in the ranks. Whoever worked on the case had benefited from it.
"I can't believe it. I can't. This cant be happening," I said over and over again to Marc. I don't remember what he said back to me. I was beginning to rally myself, to assume a control I didn't have.
"She doesn't want to see you," Clapper said, upon his return. "She's afraid she'll break down if she does. She'll be out in a few minutes and you can ride with them to the hospital."
I was hurt, but I understood.
I waited. I told Marc that I would be in for the long haul-the hospital, the police-and that he should go home and make his place nice. The three of us would sleep there, Lila and I in the bed, he in his living room.
The police made small talk. I started pacing. One of the uniforms gathered my clothes from the foyer and brought them over to the couch near me.
Then Lila was coming out of the room. She was shaken. Her hair was disheveled but I saw no marks on her face. A short, dark-haired woman in uniform trailed her.
She was wearing my robe, but it was belted with another tie. Her eyes were bottomless-lost. I couldn't have reached her then no matter how hard I tried.
"I'm so sorry," I said. "You'll be okay. You'll make it. I did," I said.
We stood there looking at each other, both of us crying.
"Now we really are clones," I said.
The female detective moved us along.
"Lila says you have another roommate."
"Oh my God, Pat," I said. I had forgotten him until that moment.
"Do you know where he is?"
"The library."
"Can someone get to him?"
"I want to go with Lila."
"Then leave him some kind of note; we don't want him touching things. And he should stay somewhere else tonight until we can secure that back window."
"At first, I thought it was Pat playing a prank on me," Lila said. "I came back from the bathroom and the door to my bedroom was farther out from the wall than usual, like someone was standing behind it. So I pushed it in and he pushed it out and back and forth until I got tired of it and said, 'Come on, Pat,' and walked into the room. He threw me on the bed."
"We've got an exact time," the female detective said. "She looked up at her digital clock. It was eight fifty-six P.M."
"When I felt sick," I said.
"What?" The female detective looked mystified.
I didn't know where to stand. I was not the victim. I was the victim's friend. The detective took Lila out to the car, and I hurriedly went into Pat's room.
I did something nasty. I used the speculum to weigh down the note. I left it on his pillow because the rest of the room was a mess. I could be certain he'd see it there: "Pat, Lila was raped. She is physically okay. Call Marc. You need to find somewhere else to stay tonight. I'm sorry to have to tell you this way."
I left the light on in his room and looked at it. I decided not to care about Pat-I couldn't. He would be okay, bounce back. It was Lila now.
We drove to the hospital in silence. I sat in the back with Lila and we held hands.
"It's horrible," she said at one point. "I feel filthy. All I want to do is shower."
I squeezed her hand.
"I know," I said.
We had to wait what seemed an interminable time in the emergency room. It was crowded and because, I've always assumed, she had not struggled and had no open wounds, could sit upright and talk coherently, she was made to wait. Repeatedly, I went up to the woman in admissions and asked her why we had to wait. I sat with Lila and helped her fill out the insurance form. There had been none of this for me. I had been wheeled directly in, from ambulance gurney to examination room.
Finally they called her. We walked down the hall and found the room. The examination was long and plodding, and several times we had to wait while the man examining her was called into various other rooms. I held her hand as Mary Alice had held mine. Tears rolled down my face. Toward the end Lila said, "I want you to leave." She asked for the female detective. I went and got her and sat in the waiting room, shaking.
My nightmares had never let Lila be raped. She and Mary Alice were safe. Lila was my clone, my friend, my sister. She had heard every part of my story and still loved me. She was the rest of the world-the pure half-but now she was with me. While I waited, I became convinced that I could have prevented Lila's rape. By coming home faster, by knowing instinctively that something was wrong, by never having asked her to be my friend in the first place. It didn't take me long before I thought, and then said, "It should have been me." I began to worry for Mary Alice.
I shook, and I wrapped my arms around my shoulders and rocked back and forth in my seat. I felt nauseous. My whole world was turning over; whatever else I'd had or known became eclipsed. There was no chance to escape, I realized; from now on this would be it. My life and the lives of those around me. Rape.
The female detective came out for me.
"Alice," she said, "Lila is going with Detective Clapper down to the police station. She asked me to go home with you and get some clothes for her."
I didn't know how to act. Even then I was beginning to realize that Lila didn't know what to do with me around. There was Alice her friend, and Alice the successful rape victim. She needed one without the other, but that was impossible.
The detective drove me home and I unlocked the door. Pat still had yet to come home. The light I had left on had been turned off by someone else. I plunged in. I remembered how Tree and Diane had brought me bad clothes-patched jeans and no underwear. I wanted Lila to have comfort. I pulled down a large duffel from her closet and opened her drawers. I packed all her underwear, all her flannel gowns, slippers, socks, sweatpants, and loose shirts. I threw in a book and from her bed a stuffed animal and a pillow.
I needed things too. I knew already that Lila and I would never sleep in that house again. I walked to the back, where my room was. The door was closed. I asked the detective if I could go in.
I said a little prayer to no one and turned the knob. The room was cold because of the open window through which he'd climbed. I switched on the light near the door.
My bed was stripped. I walked toward it. In the center was a small fresh bloodstain. Nearby were other, smaller ones, like tears.
She had come out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, gone to her bedroom, and played the door game, thinking it was Pat. Then the rapist had shoved her onto the bed on her stomach. She saw the clock. In the darkness, she saw him only for a few seconds. He blindfolded her with the tie from my robe, and then, turning her around on the bed, made her hold her hands in front of her chest in the prayer position while he tied her wrists with bungee cords and a cat leash we kept in the front closet. This meant he had gone through the house while she was in the shower. He knew no one else was home. He made her get to her feet and walk back to my bedroom, where he made her lie down on my bed.
That was where he'd raped her. He asked her where I was during the attack. Somehow knew my name. Somehow knew Pat would not be back until much later. At one point, he asked about the tip money I had on my dresser and took that. She did not struggle. She did as he said.
He had her put on my robe and left her there, blindfolded.
She started screaming, but the boys in the apartment above us were playing loud music. No one heard her or did anything if they had. She had to go through the front of the apartment, outside, and up the stairs, banging on their door until they answered. They held beers in their hands. They were smiling, expecting more friends. She asked them to untie her. They did. And to call the police.
Lila would tell me all of this in the coming weeks. Now I tried hard not to look at the blood, at my bed, at the possessions he had gone through. My clothes in the closet spilled onto the floor. Photos on my desk. My poems. I grabbed a flannel gown to match Lila's, and some clothes off the floor. I wanted to take my old Royal typewriter, but this would seem silly and selfish to everyone but me. I looked at it and looked at the bed.
As I was turning to leave, a gust of wind from the window slammed the door shut. All the hope I had had of living a normal life had gone out of me.
The detective and I drove to the Public Safety Building. We took the elevator up to the third floor and exited into the familiar hallway outside the bulletproof glass that looked onto the police dispatcher's station. The dispatcher pressed the button for the security door and we entered.
"Through there," a policeman said to the detective.
We walked toward the back.
The photographer was holding up his camera. Lila stood against a wall holding a number in front of her chest. Hers, like mine, was written in bold Magic Marker on the back of an SPD envelope.
"Alice," the photographer said upon seeing me.
I placed the duffel with our clothes in it on an empty desk.
"Remember me?" he asked. "I took evidence in your case in eighty-one."
"Hello," I said.
Lila remained against the wall. Two other policemen came forward.
"Wow," one said. "It's great to meet you. We don't get the opportunity to see many victims after a conviction. Do you feel good about your case?"
I wanted to give these men a response. They deserved it. They usually saw only the side of a rape case that Lila, forgotten against the wall, represented: fresh or weary victims.
"Yes," I said, aware that what was happening was all wrong, stunned by my sudden celebrity. "You guys were great. I couldn't have asked for better. But I'm here for Lila."
They realized the strangeness of it too. But what wasn't strange?
They posed her and while they did, they talked to me.
"She doesn't really have any marks. I remember you were real messed up. Madison worked you over good."
"What about the wrists?" I said. "He tied her up. I wasn't tied up."
"But he had a knife, right?" a policeman asked, anxious to review the details of my case.
The photographer went up to Lila. "Yeah," he said. "Hold up your wrist in front. There, like that."
Lila did as instructed. Turned to the side. Held her wrists up. Meanwhile the uniforms surrounded me and asked me questions, shook my hand, smiled.
Then it was time to make phone calls. They set Lila and me up at a desk in the opposite corner. I sat on the top of it, and Lila sat in front of me in a chair. She told me the number of her parents and I dialed.
It was late now, but her father was still up.
"Mr. Rinehart," I said, "this is Alice, Lila's roommate. I'm going to put Lila on now."
I handed her the phone.
"Daddy," she began. She was crying. She got it out and then handed the phone back to me.
"I can't believe this is happening," he said.
"She'll be okay, Mr. Rinehart," I said, trying to reassure him. "It happened to me and I'm okay."
Mr. Rinehart knew about my case. Lila had shared it with her family.
"But you're not my daughter," he said. "I'll kill the son of a bitch."
I should have been prepared for this kind of anger at her attacker, but instead I felt it to be directed at me. I gave him Marc's phone number. Told him we would be sleeping there that night, and that he should call with his flight arrival time. Marc had a car, I said; we'd meet him at the airport.
Lila went with the police to fill out an affidavit. It was late now, and I sat on the metal desktop and thought about my parents. My mother was just now back working again after having a two-year increase in panic attacks. Now I would ruin that. Logic was beginning to leave, draining away from me. With blame so heavy and nowhere to place it but the fleeing back of a rapist Lila could barely describe, I took it on.
I dialed.
My mother answered the phone. Late-night calls meant only one thing to her. She waited at home for the news of my death.
"Mom," I said, "this is Alice."
My father picked up.
"Hi, Dad," I said. "First, I need you to know that I'm okay."
"Oh, God," my mother said, anticipating me.
"There's no way to say it but flat out. Lila was raped."
"Oh, Jesus."
They asked a lot of questions. In answer I said, "I'm fine." "On my bed." "We don't know yet." "Inside the interrogation room." "No weapon." "Shut up, I don't want to hear that."
This last one was a response to what they would say over and over again. "Thank God it wasn't you."
I called Marc.
"We saw him," he said.
"What?"
"Pat called and I went over and we drove around looking for him."
"That's crazy!"
"We didn't know what else to do," Marc said. "We both want to kill the bastard. Pat can't see straight he's so mad."
"How is he?"
"Messed up. I dropped him off at a friend's house afterward. He wanted to stay with us."
I listened to Marc's story. They both had a few shots, then drove up and down the nearby streets in the dark. Marc kept a crowbar in the car. Pat would scan the lawns and houses as Marc slowed down and then sped up. Finally, they heard yelling, and then saw a man running out from between two houses. He ran onto the sidewalk and then, seeing Marc's car, turned quickly and headed back down the block, slowing his pace to a walk. Marc and Pat followed him. I can only imagine what they said and what they were planning.
"Pat was scared," Marc said.
"It might not have been him," I said. "Did you ever think of that?"
"But they say criminals sometimes stick around," Marc countered. "Besides the yelling and then the way he acted."
"You were following him," I said. "Marc, you can't do anything-that's the deal. Beating someone up doesn't help anyone."
"Well, he turned around and charged the car."
"What?"
"He just came at us, yelling and screaming. I almost shit my pants."
"Did you get a good look at him?"
"Yeah," he said. "I think so. It had to be him. He stood in the headlights yelling at us."
By the time Lila and I were driven to Marc's apartment on the other side of campus, I was too overwhelmed for further talk. I wanted to keep Lila safe from knowing about Marc and Pat's actions. I could understand it, but I didn't have much patience with it anymore. Violence only begat violence. Couldn't they see it left all the real work to the women? The comforting and the near impossible task of acceptance.
Inside Marc's bedroom Lila and I changed into our flannel gowns. I turned my back while she changed and I promised I would guard the door.
"Don't let Marc in."
"I won't," I said.
She got into bed.
"I'll be right back. I'll sleep on the outside edge, so you'll be safe."
"What about the windows?" she asked.
"Marc has bolts on them. He grew up in the city, remember?"
"Did you ever ask Craig to fix that back window?" Her back was to me when she asked this.
I felt the question, and its attendant accusation, like a knife at the base of my spine. Craig was our landlord. I had gone upstairs to his apartment two weeks before to ask him to fix the lock on my window.
"Yes," I said. "He never did."
I slipped out of the room and consulted with Marc. The only bathroom was through the bedroom. I wanted all details taken care of, down to this: If Marc had to urinate in the middle of the night, I told him to use the sink in his kitchen.
Back in the bedroom I slipped into bed.
"Can I rub your back?" I asked.
Lila was tucked into a ball with her back facing me. "I guess so."
I did.
"Stop," she said. "I just want to sleep. I want to wake up and have it be over."
"Can I hold you?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I know you want to take care of me, but you can't. I don't want to be touched. Not by you, not by anybody."
"I'll stay awake until you fall asleep."
"Do what you want, Alice," she said.
The next morning Marc knocked and then brought us tea. Mr. Rinehart had called with his flight number. I promised Lila I would get all of her stuff out of the apartment ASAE She had a list of things she wanted her father and me to pack for the flight home. I called Steve Sherman. I needed a place to store my stuff. Lila had a friend who would take hers. Moving and packing: Her stuff was something I could take control of. I could serve her that way.
I stood at the same gate where Detective John Murphy had waited and watched for me. I had already met Lila's father once, on a visit to her house that summer. He was a huge, hulking man. As he approached me, I could see him begin to cry. His eyes were already red and swollen. He came up, put down his bags, and I held him as he wept.
But I felt like an alien in his presence. I knew the landscape, or so everyone imagined. I had been raped and through a trial and been in the papers. Everyone else was just an amateur. Pat, the Rineharts-their lives had not prepared them for this.
Mr. Rinehart was not kind to me. Eventually he said things to my mother and me about how they would handle their own. He told my mother that his daughter was nothing like me, and that they didn't need my advice or her counsel. Lila, he said, needed to be left alone.
But at first, on that day, he cried and I held him. I knew, more than he ever could, what his daughter had gone through and how impossible it was for him to do anything to fix it. In that moment, before the blame and separation set in, he was broken. My mistake was in not seeing how lost I had become. I behaved as I thought I should: like a pro.
At Marc's, Lila stood when she saw her father. They hugged and I shut the door to the bedroom. I went to stand as far away as I could to give them their privacy. In the tunnel that was Marc's attic kitchen, I smoked one of Marc's cigarettes. I counted, packing all our possessions in my head and distributing them to the homes of various friends. I thought a million different thoughts in every moment. When a spoon slipped in the sink, I jumped.
That night Mr. Rinehart took us out for dinner at the Red Lobster. Marc, myself, Pat, and Lila. It was all-you-could-eat shrimp night and he kept urging us on. Pat did his best and so did Marc, who preferred Szechwan noodles and snow peas. Neither Pat nor Marc were macho in the traditional sense; conversation stalled repeatedly. Mr. Rinehart's eyes were swollen and bloodshot. I don't remember what I said. I was uncomfortable. I could feel how much Lila wanted to leave. I didn't want to give her over to her parents. I thought of Mary Alice French-braiding my hair the morning of my own rape. I had sensed it almost from the start at the airport-there were going to be reasons put forth by people, by her parents, perhaps, that would prevent me from helping. I was to be banished. I had the disease, it was catching. I knew this, but I kept clinging. Clinging so hard, wanting to be with Lila in this shared thing so desperately, that my presence was bound to suffocate her.
We drove them to the airport. I don't remember saying good-bye to her. I was already thinking of the move out, of saving what was left to me.
I moved all our possessions, Lila's and mine, out of our apartment within twenty-four hours. I did it alone. Marc had classes. I called Robert Daly, a student who had a truck, and arranged for him to pick the stuff up after I had boxed it. I gave him my furniture-whatever he wanted he could take, I said. Pat was dragging his heels.
No one seemed to understand my urgency. In the midst of packing that day, I was in the kitchen and I knocked the table with my hip. A small, handmade bunny mug that my mother had given me after the trial fell on the floor and broke. I looked at it and cried, but then stopped. There was no time for that. I would not allow myself to be attached to things. It was too dangerous.
I had cleared my bedroom out first, in the early morning, and now, as Robert was due to arrive before dark, I turned the doorknob for one last scan of my room. I had been thorough. But on the floor near the dresser I found a photo of myself and Steve Sherman that had been taken on the porch of the house over the summer. We were happy in the photo. I looked normal. Then, in the closet, I found a valentine he had given me earlier that year. The photo, the valentine were ruined now-remains of a crime scene.
I had tried to be like everyone else. During my junior year, I had given it a go. But that wasn't the way it was going to be. I could see that now. It seemed I had been born to be haunted by rape, and I began to live that way.
I took the photo and valentine and shut the door of my bedroom for the final time. I drifted into the kitchen, holding them. I heard a noise in the other room. It echoed now that I had emptied the room out.
I jumped.
"Hello?" came a voice.
"Pat?" I walked into the other room. He had brought a green trash bag to get some of his clothes.
"Why are you crying?" he said.
I hadn't realized I had been, but as soon as he asked I became aware of the dampness on my cheeks.
"Aren't I allowed to cry?" I asked.
"Well, yeah, it's just that… "
"It's just that what?"
"I guess I expected you to be okay with it."
I yelled horrible things at him. We had never been best friends and now we would cease even to be acquaintances.
Robert Daly showed up. He was a rock. That is how I remember him. We shared a taste for honest criticism in our fiction workshop and a respect for Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. Robert and I weren't close either, but he helped me. I cried in front of him and he didn't like it when I apologized. He took my rocker and daybed and some other items. For a few years, until it became obvious I wouldn't come back for them, he dropped me cards to say my furniture was doing fine and wishing I were there.
I changed, but I didn't know it.
I went home for Thanksgiving. Steve Sherman came over from New Jersey to spend time with me. He had been Lila's friend first, before becoming my boyfriend, and the idea that both of us had been raped overwhelmed him. He told me that when he found out about Lila, he had been in the shower. His roommate had come in to tell him. He'd looked down at his penis and suddenly felt a self-hatred he couldn't describe, knowing that so much violence had come to his friends that way. He wanted to help. He stored the rest of my things and I slept in his spare bedroom. When Lila came back two weeks after her rape for the GRE's, she stayed in his house. He kept me company and volunteered as my security guard, walking me home from work or class.
The division that came was inevitable, I guess. People felt compelled to take sides. It began the night of the rape when the police had come up to me so openly. Lila's friends started avoiding me, looking away or to the side. During her overnight for the GRE's, the police came to Steve's house to do a photo lineup. I was in the bedroom with Lila and two policemen. They spread the small, wallet-size photos out on the desk. I looked over Lila's shoulder.
"I bet you recognize one of these," a uniformed policeman said to me.
They had put a photo of Madison and his lineup buddy, Leon Baxter, in the pack. I was so mad I couldn't speak.
"Is the one who raped her in here?" Lila asked. She was sitting at a desk in front of me. I couldn't see her face.
I left the room. I was sick. Steve reached his arms out and grabbed hold of me.
"What is it?"
"They put a photo of Madison in there," I said.
"But he's still in jail, isn't he?"
"Yes, I think so, yes." I hadn't even thought to ask.
"Attica," a uniform said in answer.
"To have to pick out her rapist and see him there, the focus is all wrong," I said to Steve. "It's not fair."
The door opened. Lila came out into the living room behind the officer who held the mug shots in an envelope.
"We're done here," a policeman said.
"Did you see him?" I asked Lila.
"She saw something," the policeman said. He wasn't happy.
"I'm stopping it now. I'm not going to pursue it," Lila said.
"What?"
"It was a pleasure getting to meet you, Alice," the officer said. He shook my hand. His partner did too.
They left and I looked at Lila. My question must have been obvious.
"It's too much," Lila said. "I want my life back. I watched what it did to you."
"But I won," I said, incredulous.
"I want it to be over," she said. "This way it is."
"You can't just will it away," I said.
But I felt her trying. She took her GRE's and returned home until after Christmas. Our plan was to live together in graduate student housing. Her family was going to loan her a car because it was the only way to get back and forth from campus. That, or the bus, which I would take.
I'll never know what the police said to Lila in that room or whether or not she saw her rapist among those men. At the time, I couldn't understand her decision not to pursue it, although I thought I did. The police had a theory that Lila might have been raped out of revenge. They based this on several things. Madison, though in Attica, had friends. He had been given a maximum sentence and would be inside a bare minimum of eight years. The rapist knew my name. Raped her on my bed. Asked after me while he did. He knew my schedule and that I was a waitress at Cosmos. All this could have been evidence of a connection to Madison, or it could just have been the thorough research of a criminal intent on finding his victim alone. I still choose to believe that part of the horror of the crime was in its cruel coincidence. Conspiracy seemed a stretch to me.
Lila didn't want to know. She wanted out of it.
The police interviewed my friends. They went to Cosmos and interviewed the owner and the man who flipped the pizzas inside the front window. But there were other rapes being done with a similar MO to Lila's. If Lila wouldn't prosecute, any link to me was now inconsequential. They had no witness and, with no witness, no case. The police dropped their investigation. Lila went home until January. She gave me a copy of her schedule. I told her teachers why she wouldn't be in attendance at finals. I called her friends.
My life became streamlined, and the fallout began.
I went home for Christmas.
My sister was depressed. She had graduated and won a Fulbright, but was now living at home and working in a garden shop. Her Arabic major was not translating into the job she had hoped for. I went to her room to cheer her up. At some point she said, "Alice, you just don't understand, everything comes so easily for you." I sputtered in my disbelief. A wall went up. I cut her out.
I had nightmares now even more vivid than before. My sporadic journal of those years is full of them. The recurring image is one I'd seen in a documentary of the Holocaust. There are fifty or sixty chalk-white and emaciated dead bodies. Their clothes have been stripped from them. The clip shows a bulldozer rolling them into a deep, open grave, the bodies plunging as a tangled whole. Faces, mouths, skulls with eyes set deep, the minds inside gone to unimaginable lengths in order to have survived. Then this. Darkness, death, filth, and the idea that one person could be struggling, trying to stay alive in there.
I woke up in cold sweats. Sometimes I screamed. I would turn over and lie facing the wall. Enter the next step: Awake now, I consciously played out the intricate plot of my almost death. The rapist was inside the house. He was climbing up the stairs. He knew, on instinct, which steps would betray him by a noise. He was loping down the hall. A breeze came through the front window. No one would think to question it if they were awake in the other rooms. A light scent of another person, someone else in the house, would waft into them, but like one small noise, it would warn no one but me that something was going to happen. I would feel then my door opening, a sense of another presence in the room, the air changed to allow for a human weight. Far away, near my wall, something was breathing my air, stealing my oxygen. My breath would grow shallow and I would make a promise to myself: I would do anything the man wanted. He could rape me and cut me and take off my fingers. He could blind me or maim me. Anything. All I wanted to do was live.
Resolved, I would gather my strength. Why was he waiting like this? I would turn slowly around in the dark. Where the man stood so vividly in my imagination, there was no one, there was the door to my closet. That was all. Then I would turn on the light and check the house, going up to each door and trying the knob, sure it would give and there he would be, standing on the other side and laughing at me. Once or twice the noise I made woke my mother. "Alice?" she would call out.
"Yes, Mom," I said, "it's just me."
"Go back to sleep."
"I will," I said. "I'm just getting something to eat."
Upstairs in my bedroom, I would try to read. Not look at the closet, or, quickly, over to the door.
I never questioned what was happening to me. It all seemed normal. Threat was everywhere. No place or person was safe. My life was different from other people's; it was natural that I behaved differently.
After Christmas, Lila and I tried to make a go of it in Syracuse. I wanted to help her, but I also needed her. I believed in talking. To be with her after dark, I quit Cosmos. This was easy: They didn't want me back. When I had gone to ask about getting day shifts, the owner was distant and standoffish. The man who flipped the pizzas came up after the owner had left.
"Don't you get it?" he said. "The police have been in here asking questions. We don't want you here."
I left in tears and walked blindly into someone.
"Watch where you're going," the man said to me.
It was snowing. I quit the Review. The bus back to the place Lila and I were living broke down a lot. Tess was on leave. I stopped going to poetry readings. One night, I was a little later than usual getting home-it had grown dark-and Steve met me at the doorstep. "Where were you?" he asked. His tone was angry, accusatory.
"We needed food," I said.
"Lila called me because she was scared. She wanted someone to sit with her."
"Thanks for coming over," I said. I was holding a bag of groceries and it was cold.
"You should have been here."
I walked inside and hid my tears.
When Lila said it wasn't working out, that she didn't like the apartment, and she was going to go home for a few weeks and then move in with Mona, a friend she'd recently made, I entered a sort of shock. I thought we'd be in this together. Clones.
"It's just not working, Alice," she said. "I can't talk about it the way you want me to and I feel isolated here."
Steve and Marc were the only two people who had regularly visited the house. Both of them, though scrupulously avoiding each other, were more than willing to sit guard. But they were my friends-my boyfriends, to be exact-and Lila knew it. They were there primarily for me, and to help me out by helping her. She needed to separate. This is clear to me now. Then, I felt betrayed. We went through our record albums and other things that had been common property over our two years together. I cried, and if she wanted something, I gave it to her. I gave her things she didn't ask for. I left possessions behind me to mark my place. Could I ever get back to where I had been? Where was that? A virgin? A freshman in college? Eighteen?
I sometimes think nothing hurt me more than Lila's decision to stop speaking to me. It was a total blackout. She did not return my phone calls when I was finally able to get her new number out of one of her friends. She passed by me on the street and did not speak. I called her name. No response. I blocked her path, she moved around me. If she was with a friend, they indeed looked at me-burning with a hatred I couldn't understand but nonetheless took in.
I moved in with Marc. In four months I would graduate. I stayed inside his apartment for everything but my classes. He drove me everywhere, a willing chauffeur, but mostly he stayed away from me. He was at the architecture studio late into the night; sometimes he slept there. When he was home I asked him to investigate noises, check the locks, to please just hold me.
The week before graduation, I saw Lila again. I was with Steve Sherman. We were in the student mall on Marshall Street. She saw me, I saw her, but she walked right by me.
"I can't believe it," I said to Steve. "We're graduating in a week and she still won't talk to me."
"Do you want to speak to her?"
"Yes, but I'm afraid. I don't know what to say."
We decided that Steve would stay where he was standing, and I would circle around again in the opposite direction.
I ran into her.
"Lila," I said.
She was not surprised. "I wondered if you'd try to speak to me."
"Why won't you talk to me?"
"We're different, Alice," she said. "I'm sorry if I've hurt you, but I need to move on with my life."
"But we were clones."
"That was just something we said."
"I've never been so close to anyone."
"You have Marc and Steve. Isn't that enough?"
We somehow got from that to wishing each other well at graduation. I told her Steve and I were going over to a nearby restaurant to have mimosas. She could come and join us if she wanted.
"Maybe you'll see me there," she said, then left.
I rushed into the bookshop we'd been standing in front of and bought her a book of Tess's poems, Instructions to the Double. Inside I wrote something that escapes me now. It was sappy and came straight from my heart. It said I would always be there for her, all she had to do was call.
We did run into her at the bar. She was tipsy and had a boy with her whom I knew she had a crush on. She didn't want to sit with us, but stood by our table while she talked about sex. She told me she had been fitted for a diaphragm and that I was right, sex was great. I was audience now, not friend or intimate. She was too busy doing what I was doing-proving to the world that she was fine. I forgot to give her the book. They left.
On our way home, Steve and I passed by another, posher student hangout. I saw Lila sitting inside with her crush and a bunch of people I didn't know. I told Steve to wait, and I rushed inside with the book. The people at the table looked up.
"This is for you," I said, offering it to Lila. "It's a book."
Her friends laughed because the fact that it was a book was obvious.
"Thank you," Lila said.
A waitress arrived to take drink orders. Lila's crush was watching me.
"I wrote something inside," I said.
As her friends ordered drinks, she looked up at me. I thought she pitied me then. "I'll read it later, but thank you. It looks like a good book."
I never saw Lila again.
On the day of graduation, I didn't attend. I couldn't imagine being there, trying to celebrate, seeing Lila and her friends. Marc had a project due. His school wasn't over yet. Steve was at graduation. Mary Alice was there too. I had told my parents I just wanted to get the hell out of Syracuse. They agreed. "The faster, the better," they said.
I packed my remaining possessions in a silver rental car. It was a Chrysler New Yorker; they'd run out of subcompacts. I drove this boat back to Paoli, knowing the car itself would get a laugh out of my parents.
Syracuse was over. Good riddance, I thought. I was going to the University of Houston in the fall. I was going to get an MA in poetry. I would spend the summer trying to reinvent myself. I had not seen Houston, never been south of Tennessee, but it was going to be different there. Rape would not follow me.