“Yes.”
Ariel could see the nurse’s pause, her pen hovering over the paper before moving to a slightly different spot. This had not been the right answer.
*
“Antibiotic, in case of sexually transmitted disease.”
The sexual assault forensic examination was finally coming to an end. There had been swabs and dyes, blood test and urine, vaginal exam and rectal, fluids and tissues, this exam had gone on forever, poked and probed, cold hard instruments and cold dispassionate assessments, Ariel’s humiliation rising and falling and rising again, reporting and then waiting and then repeating her story, describing her injuries, physical and psychological, her movements, her actions.
She hadn’t expected this to be an all-day trauma of one intrusion after another. But then again she hadn’t known what to expect; this type of day is not something you think about until you undergo it, it’s not an experience you sit around wondering about.
“And this is a morning-after pill.”
“Oh,” Ariel said, surprised. She wanted to decline, but she was worried about how that would look. She didn’t want to give any more wrong answers. “Oh,” she said again, accepting the pill, already planning how she’d throw it away.
Ariel hadn’t felt good about any of that—not the cop’s questions, nor the nurse’s, nor her own answers. Every side has a story—he said, she said—but criminal trials hinge on evidence. Was there evidence to support her story?
She felt a panic attack coming on, and tried to take deep breaths, to control her body. Something you think is entirely yours to control, and you assume that all the choices are up to you, then you learn that you’re wrong. The choices are not yours. Neither is the control.
*
She looks around the airport security area, and can’t see John anywhere. He’d waited in line at a different counter, bought a seat on a different flight, maybe went through security at a different checkpoint. He might still be negotiating options with a ticket agent, or he might already be rushing to catch the Amsterdam flight. Ariel doesn’t know, and she has no way of contacting him. Radio silence.
John was right: She felt naked in this security line without any luggage, not even a handbag. She isn’t looking at her phone because she doesn’t have one; no headphones around her neck. Not even a paperback in hand. Not even a newspaper.
Ariel can feel the security guard taking her in, the whole package, all the things that are missing. He waves her ahead, and she leads with her documents, which the officer carefully examines. He inserts the passport into a scanner. Turns over her boarding pass, then looks at her. “No bags?”
Ariel shakes her head. She doesn’t trust herself to speak.
“Por qué?”
“They were stolen.”
“I am very sorry. Where did this happen?”
“From the cloakroom of our hotel.”
“Our hotel?”
Fuck. That was a mistake.
The guard looks past Ariel to the other waiting travelers. “Are you traveling with someone?”
“No.” Should she explain about her husband? No, she shouldn’t get bogged down in any explanations. “No,” she says again.
“Did you report this to the police?”
She shakes her head.
“It is very important to report crimes. For the records.”
“Yes, I agree. But I didn’t want to waste the time.”
Ariel can feel this man’s dubious gaze on her, and then he turns away, back to his keyboard, his monitor. Sometimes men are dubious of a woman simply because they’re sexist assholes. Sometimes, though, it’s because the woman is lying through her teeth.
“I’ve had a very bad trip,” she says. “I just want it to end.”
The man looks at her and nods, but doesn’t seem to be agreeing, and then suddenly there are two policemen standing beside her, bulletproof vests, tactical rifles strapped across their chests.
“Se?ora?”
*
After the hospital, Ariel returned to her friend Jenny’s unoccupied house, immediately fell apart, and stayed that way for days on end, barely eating, sleeping all the time but never soundly and never rested, angry at everything, including herself.
Then the weekend loomed. Jenny would be returning with her adoring husband and loud little kids. “You’re welcome to stay, there’s plenty of room.” But Ariel couldn’t stand the thought of being with other people. So she locked up the house, returned the key to its hiding spot in the herb bed, and took a taxi to the railroad to the city. She checked herself into a hotel, then promptly emptied their joint checking account before Bucky could consider shutting her out. Who knew how he was going to respond to her flight, her silence, her refusal to even take his calls. She’d have to talk to him sooner or later, but she just couldn’t bear it. Not yet.
Ariel knew that this small pile of cash wasn’t going to last forever. She’d still need to find a new place to live and furnish it; even if secondhand and yard-sale, this wouldn’t be free. Groceries, utilities, she needed to buy a car, fill it with gas, one thing after another, the expenses would add up quickly, overwhelmingly, and Ariel’s journey from wealthy housewife to single, unemployed, and penniless would be very short. And on the near horizon, all sorts of new expenses were looming. And they’d last for decades.
She needed a plan.
*
To the purely daytime denizens of a town, the late-night ecosystem of restaurants and bars can be unrecognizable, a whole scene of service-industry employees plus the drunks and hustlers and drug dealers and troublemakers who come out when the respectable citizens go home.
It’s eleven at night when Persephone walks into the Sprit, named by the owners for some esoteric part of a boat, hoping to attract the sailing crowd. It worked.
Persephone kisses the hostess on the cheek. “Hey Lea. How’s your dad?”
“He’s doing better, thanks for asking.”
Persephone nods at Suze, who asks, “The usual?” while pulling a pint for someone else. Nearly all the bar seats are taken. For lunch and dinner, the Sprit is the town’s sole fine-dining establishment—local, organic, handcrafted, small-batch, all the blah-blah-blah that seduces the weekenders, the foodies, the bearded dudes studiously swirling their glasses of biodynamic wines, food bloggers staging their plates for Instagram, oohing and aahing over, what, pea broth.
“Hey,” Persephone says, taking the seat saved by Kirsten’s knockoff Coach bag, bought on Canal Street. They’d gone to the city together for that shopping expedition.