“He just assaulted you!” my mom said, helping me get to my feet. She shot both Tom and Helen a furious look, which they met with their own.
“Mom,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Stop. Let’s just go.” Having the police there would only have made the situation worse. They’d demand to know what incited Tom to hit me, and I couldn’t handle the idea of being accused of rape, put in handcuffs, and driven off in the back of a squad car. I couldn’t believe any of this was happening, at all.
“Don’t come back here again,” Tom said, cradling his right hand to his broad chest. “Either of you. You’re not welcome.” He was breathing hard, and winced when he tried to straighten his fingers. He might have broken them; from the redness of his skin, I could already see that his knuckles would bruise. My first instinct was to offer to take a look, but I knew he wouldn’t let me.
I glanced up to the second story and saw the white, gauzy curtain in Amber’s room shift. Her window was open, so I suspected she’d been listening in. She was probably happy her father had hit me. It took everything in me not to shove my way inside the house, run up the stairs, and beg her to talk to me.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Helen said, tearfully. Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest, her hands running up and down her biceps. “What kind of monster are you?”
“It’s Amber who should be ashamed,” my mom said. “Do you know what a false accusation like this could do to my son?”
“Mom!” I said, yanking her arm as I took a step toward the street. “Enough. This was a bad idea.” I could feel the blood pounding around my eye, the skin starting to stretch as it swelled. I knew I’d need to get ice on it as soon as I could. I’d gone there to find out what Amber’s state of mind was—what she had told her parents—and now I knew. She was claiming that I’d raped her. At that point, no matter how much I wanted to prove her wrong—to fix things—there was nothing more I could do.
Now, after talking with my captain, I threw my bag into my locker, and then made my way into the garage, where I found Mason already double-checking the inventory on our rig. “Hey,” I said, climbing into the back of the ambulance to join him.
He looked up, and his eyes went wide when he saw my face. But before he could say anything, I told him what had happened, keeping my voice low so no one else might hear. He listened, staying silent for what seemed a long moment after I was done.
“This is one fucked-up situation,” he finally said.
“Yeah, it is.” I didn’t know what else to say. That single sentence pretty much summed things up.
“What’re you gonna do?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know if there’s anything I can do. She won’t talk to me.”
“I don’t think you should worry about that,” he said. He sat back against the stainless-steel cabinets that lined the back of the rig and stared at me. “What should worry you is who she is going to talk to. Like the police.”
I nodded, unable to speak, for fear I might lose my shit right then and there. An intense pressure expanded inside my chest—the kind of pressure I couldn’t outrun. But I couldn’t let what had happened the night of the tanker truck accident happen again. I couldn’t let my partner see how messed up I really was.
“Maybe you should call a lawyer,” Mason said, and even though we were friends, I felt like he was judging me, that it was possible he thought Amber’s version of what happened was true.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, not wanting to discuss the issue further. I’d come to work in order to work, not sort out my personal life. “Thanks.”
He bobbed his head, and we managed to make it through our shift without bringing the subject up again. We made it through the next few weeks, actually, during which time I didn’t hear from Amber or her parents, and no police showed up to cart me off to jail. I told myself that maybe she’d backtracked. Maybe she’d realized that she’d contributed to what happened between us just as much as I had. But every time I had this thought, a loud voice clanged inside my head: She told you to stop. You had sex with her anyway. And then I felt ill, anxiety oozing through me, melting away any rationalizations in its path. It felt like a virus infecting my body’s defense systems, a plague intent on taking me down.
I did what I could to fight it. As July progressed, I stuck to a strict schedule—I worked at night and slept at least eight hours during the day. I went for a five-mile run before each shift, trying to drain the constant tension that gripped me. I didn’t speak with my father, and he made no effort to reach out to me. Even though it was clear that he hadn’t talked to my captain about what happened the night of the tanker truck accident, I couldn’t forgive him for threatening that he would. The things he’d said about me and Amber that afternoon in my apartment were still on repeat in my head. I kept my conversations with my mom as brief as possible, but she often called me, crying about the loss of her friendship with Helen.
“She won’t even look at me if we both happen to be in our front yards,” she told me. “She’s acting like I don’t exist.”
I had to repress a sigh every time she complained, knowing that it was just her nature to elevate her suffering above everyone else’s. She’d never admit it, but she was like my father that way. I’d often thought it was one of the deeper reasons their marriage didn’t work.
“Have you seen Amber at all?” I asked my mother toward the end of the month. I wanted to know how she was doing, if she and Daniel were still engaged. I wanted to know if she would ever find it in her heart to talk to me again. I felt her absence in my life like a gaping wound. I hated not knowing if she was okay, hated thinking that I might have hurt her.
“A few times,” my mom said. “She looks so different with her hair short.” She paused. “It looks like she’s lost weight.”