“I was safe?” I tried to comprehend this.
“Jesus, Bodie. You were weird. You were intimidating. You were always rolling your eyes at everything we said, like you thought we were the cheesiest people in the world.”
I couldn’t disagree. I could have told her things about my own life, my childhood, could have reminded her that she named me the Masturbator. But I’d learned long ago not to counter people’s trauma with my own. I said, “I am so sorry you went through that. I had no idea, and I’m really fucking sorry.”
“And I’m sorry to hate you this much. But, Bodie, I hate you so much. You set this all in motion, and now I have to face these people. My husband is having surgery this week, and I should be focusing on that, and instead I’m here. I’d like to just keep living my life. I hate you for bringing me back here.”
We were still looking only into the mirror, two women of the same age sitting in the same position. Her smallness had seemed such currency to me at Granby, when I believed the smaller you could be, as a girl, the more the world revolved around you. Next to me now, two-thirds my size, she looked like someone overwhelmed by a too-large world, someone never allowed more power than a little girl.
I said, again, “I had no idea.”
She stood without using her hands, just lifted weightlessly up. She said, “I am so fucking happy to leave this place.”
20
Dane Rubra was breathless.
He’d found you. Or someone from his “community” had. There was a D. Stanley Bloch in Silver Spring, Maryland, aged fifty-nine, working with a community youth orchestra. I was skeptical for a minute (Stanley?), but Dane’s people had done their due diligence.
“Look,” Dane said in his newly posted video. He stood in a parking lot for this one, birdsong and traffic noise around him. “Having someone’s location doesn’t mean we show up in a mob. It means we reach out to people near him, people who’ve had contact since 1995, employers, coworkers, former students. I can’t emphasize that last one enough. Former students. This guy, you find him on the street, he’s not giving you anything. But little Sally the flute player who, you know, he made her sit on his lap, maybe she has a story to tell.”
I was equally nauseated at the glee in his eyes and at his use of the name Sally, the clichéd innocent girl who was for some reason from 1955. Little Sally and her brother Timmy.
Still: He was useful. His followers were useful. Who knew what else they could find?
I had started three times that afternoon to text the defense team, telling them to talk to Beth again, but each time I’d deleted the words. I’d be telling them about Beth’s own abuse, not just Thalia’s, and without her permission. And if the defense didn’t need my accusations of Mr. Bloch, did it need Beth’s? If she’d already testified and then they called her back up there, would it look like she’d been coerced? What if the state asked if she’d spoken to me between testimonies? It should be Amy’s call, but still, I had to think it all through. And it was only Saturday; I could call Amy tomorrow.
In the meantime, this—Dane’s lackeys following the bread crumbs—this was exactly what I’d wished for.
“The other thing we want,” Dane said, “we want to keep an eye on him. This guy changed his name at least once. We don’t want him skipping town.”
I wondered how many of them were heading to Silver Spring right that second, how many were hacking your email. How many planned something bigger than that.
With a chill down my neck, down my arms, I remembered the guy who’d gone into a pizza place with a gun, looking for the nonexistent pedophile ring in the basement. I remembered how many people in America had guns.
I was shocked to discover a very, very small part of me still loyal to you, a part that wanted to send you a message: Get in your car and drive. Change your last name, too. Don’t look back.
21
I tried to distract myself with a movie, but since the Calvin Inn wi-fi was too fatigued to continue the day, I was beholden to the offerings on my room’s bulky Panasonic. Here was Bus Stop, a movie I hated. Bus Stop is what happens when no women were involved in the writing process. We get, for instance, a woman who, when Marilyn Monroe sidles up to her on the bus and says she’s been kidnapped, replies: “It wouldn’t be so bad if you were in love with him.”
I turned the TV off and checked email. Someone I didn’t know had sent a clip from a Boston station—part of an interview with Brad Keith, Thalia’s half brother. He’d gone gray in a thick-haired, dignified way. He wore a powder blue sweater. Last I knew, Brad Keith was a commodities trader.
“But in the interest of justice—” the reporter across from him said.
“Justice was served. He got his day in court, he got it again on appeal. I understand the right to a fair trial, but three trials? Four? Five? Where does it end? You can’t just keep rolling the dice till you get what you want.”
The reporter didn’t point out the difference between a hearing and a trial. She said, “There’s been new evidence. We know now th—”
“Nothing’s new. We have her old roommate with some baloney about dots. We have blood evidence that just moves the assault a few feet to the left. Omar Evans ruined all our lives, not just Thalia’s. And every time we get dragged back, he destroys us again. We’ve been through enough.”
“Your sister Vanessa disagrees.”
He shook his head, resigned. “She was so young when this happened.”
Below the video link, the email read: Look what you’re doing you unconscionable bitch.
22
Geoff had ordered pizza for dinner, and we ate at the little table in his room. Geoff, who used to accept dares to mix chocolate milk, hot sauce, ranch dressing, and orange juice in a dining hall cup and drink it down, had ended up with sophisticated taste. He’d managed to order a very specific herb pizza via Grubhub from Hanover and get it delivered still hot, along with a bottle of excellent Syrah from a completely different place. We were planning to go through the hoarded Granby junk he’d brought for Britt and Alder. But first, carbs and cheese and wine. I decided to let myself eat as much as I wanted.
He said something I didn’t get about the Calvin Inn being the place where you got whatever you deserved, and then had to explain that it was a joke about Calvinism. “Oh, one of those,” I said. “I love a good Calvinism joke.”
He asked if I thought Carlotta was going to make it, and the cheese turned gluey in my throat.
Alder joined us at nine. I’d decided to give up on staying away from him—what difference could it make if someone who was never going to testify spoke, privately, to a member of the press?—but I hadn’t told him yet what I’d learned from Beth. Alder was not the best keeper of secrets.
Geoff wheeled a roller-board suitcase out of the closet, opened it in the middle of the floor. “I had to get my mom’s nurse to dig all this up.” The suitcase was stuffed with yearbooks and papers and photos and Sentinels.
I said, “How much did you have to pay the airline to bring a two-thousand-pound suitcase?”
We sat cross-legged on a carpet that probably wasn’t completely clean.
I plucked our senior Dragon Tales off the top of the mess, opened it to the autograph pages, pretended to read: “Dear Geoff, I want to confess to a murder that—my God, Geoff, you’ve been sitting on this for twenty-seven years!”
“Dr. Calahan!” he cried. “All along!”