The next day, she got back to him. “This will come as a surprise, but the alleged victim here, at the time of the encounter, was only sixteen.”
“She couldn’t be. She was a freshman at college. She said she was nineteen.”
“I’m sure she did. Apparently she was lying about that, too. She’s in high school. Turned seventeen last May.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Matthew said, when he’d absorbed this news. “We didn’t have sex.”
“Look,” Del Rio said. “They haven’t even served you with a complaint. I told the prosecutor they have no right to ask you to appear for questioning when they haven’t done that. I also argued that no grand jury would indict for this conduct in this situation. Frankly, if you never come back to the U.S., you won’t have a problem.”
“I can’t. My wife’s American. My children live there. I do too. At least, I did.”
The rest of what Del Rio told him wasn’t so reassuring. The girl had deleted their texts from her phone, just as Matthew had. But the police had obtained a warrant to recover the texts from the phone company. “These things don’t go away,” Del Rio said. “They’re still on the server.”
The time-stamped videotape from the kiosk was another problem.
“Without being able to question you, their investigation is pretty much at a standstill. If it stays that way, I may be able to make this go away.”
“How long will that take?”
“No telling. But listen,” Del Rio said. “I can’t tell you to stay in Europe. You understand? I can’t advise you to do that.”
Matthew got the message. He stayed in England.
From that distance, he watched his life implode. Tracy sobbing into the phone, berating him, cursing him, then refusing to take his calls, and finally filing for a separation. In August, Jacob stopped speaking to him for three weeks. Hazel was the only one who continued to communicate with him the entire time, though she resented being the go-between. Now and then she sent him emojis of an angry red face. Or asked, “when r u coming home.”
These texts had come to Matthew’s UK mobile. While in England, he’d had his American phone turned off.
Now, in the taxi from the airport, he pulls his American phone from his bag and presses the power button. He’s eager to tell his kids that he’s back, and that he’ll see them soon.
*
Two weeks passed before the town prosecutor called Prakrti in again. After school she got into the car beside her mother to drive to the town hall.
Prakrti didn’t know what to tell the prosecutor. She hadn’t expected to need witnesses to testify on her behalf. She hadn’t anticipated—though she might have—that the man would be in Europe, safe from arrest and interrogation. Everything had conspired to stall the case and to stall her life as well.
Prakrti had considered asking Kylie to lie for her. But even if she swore Kylie to secrecy, Kylie would inevitably tell at least one person, who in turn would tell someone else, and before long the news would be all over school.
Telling Durva was impossible, too. She was a terrible liar. If she were questioned before a grand jury, she would fall apart. Besides, Prakrti didn’t want Durva to know about what had happened. She had promised her parents not to say anything to her little sister.
As for her parents themselves, she wasn’t sure exactly what they knew. Too embarrassed to tell them herself, she’d let the town prosecutor do that. When her parents emerged from their meeting with him, Prakrti was shocked to see that her father had been crying. Her mother was gentle with her, solicitous. She advanced propositions she would never have come up with on her own and which must have come from the prosecutor. She asked if Prakrti wanted “to see someone.” She said she understood, and emphasized that Prakrti was a “victim,” and that what had happened wasn’t her fault.
In the following weeks and months, a silence descended on the matter. Under the guise of keeping things from Durva, her parents didn’t bring the subject up at home at all. The word rape was never uttered. They did what was required, cooperated with the police, communicated with the prosecutor, but that was it.
All this put Prakrti in a strange position. She was enraged at her parents for closing their eyes on an assault that, after all, hadn’t occurred.
She was no longer certain what had happened that night at the hotel. She knew the man was guilty. But she was unsure if she had the law on her side.
But there was no turning back. She’d gone too far.
Over ten months had passed. Diwali was approaching again, the date earlier this year because of the new moon. The family had no plans to go to India.
In front of the town hall, the trees, which had been in leaf when she first came in, were now bare, revealing the statue of George Washington on a horse that stood at the end of the colonnade. Her mother parked outside the police station but made no move to get out of the car. Prakrti turned to her. “Are you coming in?”
Her mother turned to look at her. Not with her newly softened or evasive expression but the hard, strict, disapproving face that had always been hers. Her hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles went white.
“You got yourself into this predicament, you can get yourself out,” her mother said. “You want to be in charge of your life? Go on, then. I’m finished. It’s hopeless. How can we find another husband for you now?”
It was the word another that Prakrti latched on to.
“Do they know? The Kumars?”
“Of course they know! Your father told them. He said it was his duty to do so. But I don’t believe that. He never wanted to go along with the wedding. He was happy to undermine me, as usual.”
Prakrti was silent, taking this in.
“I’m sure you’re thrilled by this news,” her mother said. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
It was, of course. But the emotion that surged through Prakrti was nothing as simple as happiness or relief. It felt more like remorse, for what she’d done to her parents, and to herself. She began to sob, turning her face to the car door.
Her mother made no move to comfort her. When she spoke again, her voice was full of bitter amusement. “So you loved the boy, after all? Is that it? You were just fooling your parents all this time?”
*
In his hand, the phone begins to vibrate wildly. Months of undelivered texts and voice mails, flooding in.
Matthew is looking at the haze over the East River, and the huge billboard ads for insurance companies and movies, when the texts flood in. Most are from Tracy or his children, but friends’ names fly past, too, and colleagues’. Each text contains its first line. A review of the past four months flitting by, the appeals, the fury, the lamentations, the rebukes, the misery. He shoves his phone back into his bag.
Into the Midtown Tunnel his phone continues to buzz, the fallout, unfrozen, raining down on him.
*
“I’m not coming in,” Prakrti said, in the doorway of the prosecutor’s office. “I’m dropping the charges.”
Her face was still wet with tears. Easily misunderstood.