As I waited for that fax, I tried to focus on light work, filling in a spreadsheet or answering e-mails. Courtney had been closely following the news of the rape allegations at Duke, and that day the police had released e-mails a player had written his teammates on the night of the alleged event. It was all so fascinating, so wild—everyone wanted to hear. I sat nearby, listening and trying not to listen.
“Oh my God,” she said, eyes glued to her computer. “Listen to this! He said he was going to hire more strippers, and wrote, ‘I plan on killing the bitches as soon as they walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off—’”
White lights flashed within me, alarms blared. Run. Make it stop. “Wait!” I said. “You have got to stop reading that right now. I can’t take that right now.”
I watched all of Courtney’s excited, curious energy evaporate in an instant, only to be replaced with scrambling remorse. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I—I wasn’t thinking . . .”
“It’s fine,” I said, wrestling my voice back down. “Just stop, though.”
I felt cruel for having shamed her. She hadn’t thought ahead, hadn’t made the connection; she’d forgotten that there were people behind these news stories, that I was one of them. This was the first time I had asked someone not to talk about violence in front of me, and I was immediately embarrassed. I felt like I had done something wrong by imposing my messy feelings, and my uncommon experience, into a supposedly “normal” discussion of a news story.
The Duke rape allegations would prove to be untrue, but that wouldn’t change how the country had talked about them, which parts were found to be interesting, who was considered credible. It wouldn’t change how alone I’d felt, hearing and reading most of that coverage.
* * *
The affidavit finally came through on the fax machine around three o’clock, and I drove home early. I couldn’t really pretend to care about anything else that day, and no one expected me to.
That Saturday morning was perfectly beautiful, the kind of fragrant, bird-filled spring morning that had pleasantly shocked me my first year in North Carolina. I made coffee and brought it outside to my friend Evangeline, who’d flown into town the night before. We’d been best friends since meeting as roommates in a high school summer education program. She was one of the few people I could speak frankly with about Mom’s death.
She was settled into a whitewashed porch swing, her strong, compact body curled up because her feet didn’t reach the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but . . . will you read something for me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
“It’s the statement from the police,” I said. “I mean, I’ve read it. But I need someone else to read it, someone who isn’t a damn reporter.”
She nodded. I went inside and retrieved the three sheets of paper. When I came out, she put down her coffee and took them from me briskly before I could grab them back. As soon as they left my hand, I felt embarrassed, melodramatic, exposed, like it would have been more polite to keep those terrible things to myself.
Her serious face became more drawn. When she pulled the first sheet off the second, it stayed there, hovering in the air, the fingers of her right hand gripping it just hard enough to bend the paper.
Finally she looked at me, and I could see that we were thinking the same thing: it was actually worse than we had thought. Worse. She said, “Fifty times?” and I could tell it was anger that kept her voice from cracking. I nodded.
Although I must always have assumed there was more than one knife wound, the coroner’s count of “approximately fifty” was so much larger than I ever could have predicted. The sturgeon sound that night, which I’d always thought to be some sort of seizure—some last, heroic impulse of the body—was made of one blow after another. I heard every one.
But that wasn’t the information that I most needed Evangeline to read. There was another thing, the one thing I had never thought to expect, the one thing that weighed so heavily upon me that I knew I could not carry it myself. Not only had Crystal Perry been raped, but she had been raped anally. I could not quantify the additional pain and humiliation caused by this, but I could sense it. I could feel it threatening to push all the air from my body. Neither Evangeline nor I even mentioned it aloud. We couldn’t. Not then.
Violence is violence; it shouldn’t matter exactly what form a rape takes; there isn’t a way to compare the effects of one rape to another. But it felt so much worse to know that she had been raped in this particular way. It feels so much worse, even now. And the autopsy report shows that she was on her period. Of course, it is impossible to inhabit Michael Hutchinson’s mind, but I can’t help but think that he noticed this, found it dirty, and decided to outdo her, out-dirty her, to hurt her even more, punish her both physically and mentally. Everything about his crime indicates a man full of elemental hate, whose every action is meant to convey that he is bigger, meaner, harsher, more powerful than his victim.
I hate that I am compelled to think all of this, that I can imagine his impulses for even a moment. I hate that he’s made all of us think any of this, that’s he’s given us this one last entirely unspeakable thing to share in silence.
* * *
After the indictment, I agreed to do an interview with a reporter named David, from the Portland Press Herald. He seemed kind, and it was a good paper. He arranged to come to my house in Durham to interview me, and this meant I finally had to tell my roommates that my mother had been murdered. I had been friends with them for two years.
David wrote a good story—courteous, with little sensationalizing. Still, when I read it, I was embarrassed. I’d talked about volunteering to feed the homeless. I’d talked about what a great success I was, how I’d done well in college, how I’d done it all to respect my mother’s memory. I’d been reaching during the interview, trying to put together some kind of story for David, and now I saw my words broadcast for all to read and was repelled by them. In the aftermath of Mom’s death, I’d worked so hard to avoid the cliché of failure, and now I’d fallen into a self-congratulatory narrative of success, the same old story of bootstraps and determination. I had done well considering my circumstances, sure. But I was too eager to let people know, to perform the good-girl routine. But I didn’t know what else to do. Back then, I didn’t know how else to make sense of any of it.
I didn’t actually believe there was a way to “make her proud,” and I never really had. I didn’t believe that her spirit was hovering out there somewhere on a cloud, that she was enjoying an afterlife. Any faith I’d had in such things was destroyed on the night she died.