Something about seeing her like this poked a tiny hole in the brick wall I’d built around me. I sighed, and then sat down next to her again. “I’m just trying to get past it, Mom. I can’t change it. I can’t let it take over my life. It’s better to keep busy.”
She wiped her cheeks with her fingertips and shook her head. “Keeping busy doesn’t fix anything. It only makes you think you’re not hurting. You’re numbing yourself, just like you did back in high school. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that you’re doing it again?”
“I guess,” I said with a small shrug. “But it’s my life. What happened, happened to me. I should get to decide how to get through it.”
“Not when how you’re dealing with it is just going to make things worse,” she said. “Your dad and I have been doing some research—”
“On what?” I asked, instantly wary. I knew they had to be talking about me; I saw the way their conversations suddenly ceased whenever I walked in on them. At night, I could hear them whispering fervently to each other through a heat vent between our rooms, after they’d said they were going to sleep.
“The behavior of sexual assault victims,” she said, “and what we might be able to do to help. What you’ve been doing isn’t unique. Lots of girls try to go on like nothing’s happened. But it doesn’t work. Eventually, the trauma works its way to the surface, and it will keep doing that over and over again, making you feel worse and worse, unless you talk to someone.”
“Talking won’t do me any good,” I said, fighting the wave of revulsion in my belly that rose up when I thought about telling anyone else what Tyler did to me. I was fine. I didn’t need some person I didn’t know to talk with about my feelings. What would I say, anyway? That I’d seduced my best friend and then changed my mind at the very last minute, and now I was out there almost every night, shoving my hands into strange men’s jeans? That doing this felt how I imagined heroin addicts did when they stuck needles in their veins—it only seemed terrible if you didn’t know the pure and merciful blast of relief that followed.
“But what if it did?” my mom asked. “Can you at least please try, if not for me, for your dad? He can barely make it through the workday, Amber. He’s so upset. He keeps replaying what Tyler did, and it’s having a terrible effect on him.” She paused, and then lowered her voice, even though there wasn’t anyone around besides me to hear her speak. “He didn’t want me to tell you this, so you have to promise you won’t say anything, but it’s been so bad, he actually went to the doctor and got on antidepressants.”
“Oh,” I said, shocked to hear this. My dad was the sort who would avoid his yearly physical like he was being asked to enter a torture chamber; the fact that he had chosen to see his physician on his own accord said a lot about the state he was in. “When?”
“In August,” she said. “About a month after he hit Tyler in the front yard. The meds are just starting to help.” She gave me a hopeful look. “I found the name of a local counselor who specializes in situations like this. Would you consider talking with her? Please?”
“Fine,” I said, letting loose a long sigh. I already knew what to expect; I’d spent enough hours with Greta at the hospital and in the support group after I was released to know that therapists were pretty much paid to listen to you and then repeat back your feelings in a way that might help you understand yourself better. I’d go see this woman my mother had found, but that didn’t mean it would change anything—I understood myself perfectly well. I’d show up, go through the motions of a good client, and then I’d get back to doing what had been working for me so far. I’d stay busy, keeping my eyes on my future, so I didn’t waste another moment wishing I could find a way to change the past.
? ? ?
I stayed home that night, as my mother had requested, figuring it was the least I could do to help show her I was fine. After our talk, she had immediately called the counselor she’d mentioned, and set up an appointment for the next day.
“She can’t be any good if she doesn’t have a waiting list,” I remarked as my mom hung up.
“She happened to have a cancellation, so she’s fitting you in,” my mom said, defensively. “Don’t be so quick to judge.”
I’d gone up to my bedroom then, and locked the door, something I’d started doing since the morning after the party, when Tyler showed up at my house. I’d never had a reason to do it before.
“Fuck him,” I muttered, as I dropped down on my bed and opened my laptop. I thought about studying, but for some reason, instead, I opened a search engine and typed in the words “unreported rape.” My parents weren’t the only ones who could do research.
A list of over two hundred thousand links popped up, and I found myself clicking on one after the other, reading estimates that only thirty-two out of a hundred rapes that occur are reported; out of those, only seven might lead to an arrest, and out of these, only two might lead to a conviction. I read that it’s almost impossible to discern whether or not rape rates are increasing or declining due to the fact that rape is one of the most underreported crimes in the world. I read how the results of a forensic exam performed right after an assault are almost the only things presented at trial that can lead to a guilty verdict and result in the rapist spending time in prison. How a victim isn’t supposed to be put on trial for her sexual past or proclivities, but most of the time, she is. No wonder it’s so underreported, I thought. My instincts told me the police wouldn’t help, and it looks like I was right.
Armed with this information, I drove to Fairhaven the next day after work, parking near Village Books and walking down Harris Avenue to find the counselor’s office in a brick building near the bottom of the hill. VANESSA DOUGLAS, MSW, RM. 203, the sign on the directory informed me. I didn’t want to be there, but I’d promised my parents. I needed to do something to assuage their concern, something to help my dad’s tenuous emotional state, and if it took talking to a stranger for an hour, then so be it.
I made my way up a steep set of stairs, and then sat in the waiting room, alone. A few minutes later, I heard a door open down the hall, and the click-clack of heels coming toward me on the hardwood floor. I steeled myself as a tall, slender black woman appeared in the doorway and smiled. Her hair was short, maybe two inches sticking up all around her skull, and her eyes were almond-shaped, dark pools.
“Amber?” Vanessa asked, and I nodded, gripping the edges of my purse. I didn’t know why I was nervous. I was only there to tell this woman that I was fine, that I’d already figured out a way to move past what Tyler had done. That even FBI statistics confirmed my belief that reporting him to the police would be a futile act.