Dear Prakrti,
I apologize for not writing you sooner. My studies at the university have been extremely onerous and it has been all I can do to keep up with them. I keep myself going with the thought that I am working hard to prepare a future for myself and my future family, which of course means you. I am beginning to see that it might not be so easy as I had hoped to get a position at Google or Facebook. I am now thinking of perhaps working for a flash-trading company based in New Brunswick, where my uncle also works. I do not have a driver’s license and I am beginning to worry that this may be a problem. Do you possess a license? Do you perhaps own your own car? I know our parents have been discussing the possibility of a car being provided, as part of the dowry. This would be most acceptable to me.
Prakrti read no further. When she got off work the next day, instead of going home, she walked to the police station behind the town hall. That was almost a month ago now. Since then, the police had been looking for the man, but there had been no arrest. Something was holding things up.
“The judge is going to want to know why you waited so long,” the town prosecutor said to her.
“I don’t understand,” Prakrti replied. “I read the statute online. I’m seventeen now, but I was sixteen when it happened. By definition it’s rape.”
“That’s right. But he’s claiming there was no sex. No—penetration.”
“Of course there was penetration,” Prakrti said, frowning. “Check out our text messages. Or the video. You can see what was going on.”
The reason she’d sent the man out to the kiosk was because she knew there was a security camera there. She’d intended to save the condom, too, to tie it in a knot to preserve the semen. But, in the complications of the moment, she had forgotten.
“The texts prove there was flirting,” the prosecutor said. “They prove intention. So does the video of him buying the condoms. But we don’t have any proof of what happened in the room.”
Prakrti looked down at her hands. A fleck of green ice cream had dried on the outside of her thumb. She scraped it off.
When the man had got on top of her, she’d been flummoxed by a wave of tenderness and protectiveness toward her own body. The man’s breath smelled sharp and sweetish from alcohol. He was heavier than she expected. When Prakrti had entered the hotel room and seen the man standing in his socks, he’d looked old and hollow-cheeked. Now she had her eyes closed. She was worried it was going to hurt. She didn’t care about losing her virginity but she wanted to give away as little of herself as possible. Only what would serve the legal distinction but nothing else, no outward approval and certainly no affection.
He was between her legs now, pressing. She felt a pinch.
And she pushed him away. Sat up.
Was the pinching she had felt not penetration? She would know if that had happened, wouldn’t she?
“Obviously, if someone’s buying condoms, he’s doing it for a reason,” she told the town prosecutor. “How can I prove that there was penetration?”
“It’s harder because of the passage of time. But not impossible. How long did you have sex?”
“I don’t know. A minute?”
“You had sex for one minute.”
“Maybe less.”
“Did he climax? I’m sorry. I have to ask. The defense will ask and we have to be prepared.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been—this was my first time.”
“And you’re sure it was his penis? Not his finger?”
Prakrti thought back. “His hands were on my head. He was holding my head. Both hands.”
“What would really help me is if we had a fresh-complaint witness,” the prosecutor said. “Somebody you told right after it happened, who could corroborate your story. Is there anybody you told?”
Prakrti hadn’t told anyone. She didn’t want anyone to know.
“This asshole says there was no sex. So it would help your case, a lot, if you had told somebody closer to the time of the assault. Go home. Think about it. Try to remember if there was anybody you might have talked to. Even texted or e-mailed. I’ll be in touch.”
*
Matthew’s flight over the ocean keeps pace with the sun. His plane arrives in New York at roughly the same time of day, give or take an hour or two, as it departed London. Emerging from the terminal, he’s assaulted by the sunlight. He feels that the November day should be winding down, softening his reentry, but instead the sun is at its zenith. The loading zone is crowded with buses and taxis.
He gives the driver the address of his hotel. There is no possibility of his returning home. Tracy has agreed to bring the children to see him later this afternoon. When Matthew invited her to stay for dinner, hoping to reunite them as a family and to see where this might lead, Tracy was noncommittal. But she didn’t rule it out.
Just being back, with the Manhattan skyline in view, fills Matthew with a sense of optimism. For months he’s been powerless, safe from arrest but in limbo, like an Assange or a Polanski. Now he can act.
The news that Matthew was wanted for questioning arrived in August, while he was giving a series of lectures in Europe. The Dover police had got a copy of his passport from the hotel where he stayed, which he’d shown upon checking in. From that they tracked him to his mother’s address. After finishing his lectures, he’d come to Dorset to visit Ruth and Jim, and the letter was waiting for him.
In the six months between his visit to the college and the arrival of the letter, Matthew had nearly forgotten about the girl. He’d regaled a few of his male friends with the story, describing the girl’s bizarre come-on and her eventual change of heart. “What did you expect, you idiot?” one friend said. But he also asked, enviously, “Nineteen? What is that even like?”
In truth, Matthew can’t remember. Thinking back to that night, the thing he remembers most clearly is the way the girl’s stomach quivered when he heaved himself on top of her. It had felt as if a small animal, a gerbil or a hamster, were being crushed between them, and trying to wriggle free. A fearful or excited quivering, unique to her. All the rest has faded.
After Matthew received the letter from the police, another friend, a lawyer, advised him to hire “local counsel,” meaning a lawyer from Dover, or Kent County, who would know the prosecutor and the judge there. “Try to get a woman, too, if you can,” the friend said. “That could help if you end up going before a jury.”
Matthew had hired a woman named Simone Del Rio. During their first phone call, after he’d given his version of events, she said, “This happened last January?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think she waited so long?”
“I have no idea. I told you. She’s bonkers.”
“The delay’s good. That helps us. Let me talk to the prosecutor and see what I can find out.”