I don’t remember exactly what was said. I just kept hearing the word “rape” over and over. I can tell you that it was a brutal, merciless attack. That they had no suspects. That he had been careful, wearing a condom and perhaps shaving his body hair. They thought, and this was later confirmed by the forensic investigators, that he wore a black wool mask—like one of those ski masks that covers your entire face and head. They said it lasted for about an hour. I have thought about that more than I should. When Jenny was back in the hospital eight months after the rape, when I knew this was not over, I went home and lay on the floor with my face pressed to the ground, my body positioned the way they said hers was. I lay there for an hour. An hour is a long time to be tortured, longer than any of us can imagine. I promise you that.
Anyway … the treatment. So they explained the process. The drugs that would be given. How it would put her into a sort of coma for about a day and that, if we were lucky, it might block her memory of the rape and at the very least, and this they said they knew for sure, it would reduce any PTSD she might suffer. They said the PTSD could be debilitating and require years of therapy. Dr. Baird asked if we wanted to speak with a psychiatrist to better understand the treatment and what life might be like for her without it. He said every minute that passed reduced the effectiveness.
Charlotte’s eyes got so wide. “Yes!” she said without even looking at me. “Do it! What are you waiting for?” She stood up and pointed to the door like they should both rush out to follow her orders. But I grabbed her arm. I may not be the smartest man, but this didn’t sound right to me. If she couldn’t remember, how could she help them find this creature? How could she help put him behind bars, where he would get what he deserved? Detective Parsons nodded and looked at the floor like he knew exactly what I was saying. He finally confessed that it would be very difficult. That even if the drug didn’t work completely, anything she did remember would be ripped apart in court as unreliable. Of course it would, right? I mean, come on. Game over. Look—I’m not saying I wanted this guy caught and punished more than I wanted my daughter to recover. But where her mother saw her recovery in forgetting and pretending this never happened, I saw it coming more by way of facing the devil, you know? Looking him square in the eye and taking back a piece of what he had stolen. And I was right, wasn’t I? Jesus Christ, I wish I wasn’t, but I was.
I asked him the next logical question. “If you felt so strongly, why did you agree?”
He thought about this for several seconds. I think he had asked himself this same question a million times, but he had never had to say the answer out loud. When he did, he looked at me with a blank face, as though it should have been obvious to me. Tom had not yet come to see that the dynamics at play in his marriage were anything but obvious—or normal, for that matter.
Because if I was wrong, if Jenny didn’t get past it, I would be blamed. So why did I agree? Because I was a coward.
Chapter Four
What I haven’t mentioned yet is the carving on Jenny’s back. It didn’t really become important to the story until now, and I should explain it before I go on. Everything happened so quickly the night of Jenny’s rape. She was at the hospital within an hour of being found. She was then sedated. Her parents arrived within a half hour of that, immediately bombarded with the decision regarding the treatment. It had to be administered by the psychiatrist through the IV that the nurse inserted into the back of Jenny’s hand. There were waivers and forms to review and sign, guarantees for payment. The treatment was not covered by insurance. And, finally, she was prepped for surgery to repair the damage from the rape, and for the thorough forensic examination.
Tom stayed with her until she was rolled away to an operating room. He said it was like watching his daughter in a manufacturing plant. He had visited one in Detroit years before, when he sold Fords. Metal parts, nuts and bolts, plastic and wires and computer chips, thousands of workers with busy hands and machines with moving parts putting things together. As he watched Jenny’s limp body handled by five people, each with a job to do on her body, each concerned only with her body as her mind was manipulated with chemicals and forced to stay asleep, that was the image Tom recalled, and he was deeply disturbed by it, and by his own deferential behavior. He had wanted to lift her from the gurney, raise his fist in the air, and tell everyone to leave her the hell alone. But, of course, he did nothing of the sort.
Not to belabor their differences, but Charlotte had wanted to join her daughter in her sedation, fall asleep, and forget this ever happened. She did not watch the professionals do their work. Instead, she went home and relieved the babysitter, took a sleeping pill, tucked Lucas’s blankets tighter around his body, and then curled up in the spare bed a few feet away. She listened to him breathe until she fell asleep herself. I would come to learn that she did this often to avoid being in the same bed with Tom.