“Follow me,” she said. Once we were inside her small office, I let my eyes wander around the room, taking in the one red-brick wall, accented by three others painted a rich cream, and high, rounded-arched windows overlooking Bellingham Bay. It was a crisp and sunny autumn day, and the water and the sky were an equally eye-squinting blue.
“Nice view,” I said, still standing by the door, which I’d shut behind me.
“Isn’t it?” she said as she lowered herself into a bomber-jacket brown leather chair. “Please, have a seat.”
I glanced over to the couch, which matched her chair and was littered with several large, fluffy, red and cream pillows. I sat in the corner farthest away from her and hugged one of the pillows to my chest.
“So,” she said. “Can you tell me a little about why you’re here?”
“My mother made the appointment. I’m sure she already told you.”
“Yes,” Vanessa said, “but I’d like to hear it in your own words. And rest assured, anything you say to me in this room is confidential.”
“I don’t really want to be here,” I said, gazing out the window. It was too hard to look at her. It reminded me too much of my time with Greta in the hospital all those years ago. I couldn’t believe I was back in this same place—I liked to think that I was tougher than I used to be. I thought I was smarter. But what happened with Tyler took that away from me. He took away everything.
“That’s not uncommon,” Vanessa said, setting her elbows on the arms of her chair and crossing her long legs under her sleeveless and fitted linen dress, the hem of which hit just below her knees. “Therapy is usually the last resort for people. Not exactly on anyone’s bucket list.” I looked back to her, and she smiled again, waiting for me to speak. When I didn’t, she tried another approach. “Why don’t you just tell me a little about yourself? Did you grow up in Bellingham?” I nodded. “Any brothers or sisters?”
“No,” I said, and then launched into the “how I was a miracle who came into the world nine weeks early” story, taking my time, trying to burn through the hour I was supposed to spend in that room.
“Did you have a lot of friends growing up?” she asked, and the question sucked the air from my lungs. Only one that really mattered, I thought. And he’s the one who landed me on this couch.
“Some,” I said, when I felt like I could breathe again.
“Do they still live here?” Vanessa pressed, tilting her head to one side.
“One of them does.” The truth was, from the moment Heather left my freshman year and my illness started to get worse, it had always just been Tyler and me. He was the only person who stayed by my side, who didn’t seem to condemn me for what I’d gone through. Even Daniel hadn’t understood me the way my best friend did. And now I’d lost them both.
Vanessa didn’t say anything, making me realize that my mother must have already told her some of my history. About Tyler. I shook my head, feeling a scratching sensation in my throat. I coughed to clear it, and a few tears escaped. Damn it. I might as well stop with the bullshit small talk. I reached for the tissue box on the burled wood table between us and wiped the corners of my eyes.
“I didn’t go to the police,” I said, tucking my legs up under me as I tore off bits of the tissue I held and let them land on the pillow in my lap. I kept my head down. “I didn’t go to the hospital and have an exam. There’s no way I could prove what he did.”
“What did he do, Amber?”
I shook my head again. My mom kept using the word “rape” to describe what Tyler did to me, but I still couldn’t quite label it that way myself. The circumstances that led up to that moment in the bedroom at the party were too muddy—I was too complicit in what had occurred.
“Did you want to have sex with him?” Vanessa asked. Her voice was low, a therapist’s well-practiced, soothing serenade.
“I thought I did. We’d been flirting a lot since I got home from school, but I was engaged to Daniel, and even though I was having second thoughts about getting married, I never should have gotten so drunk. I shouldn’t have kissed Tyler or danced with him the way I did.” I’d had these same thoughts so many times over the last couple of months, I didn’t know how I could believe anything else could be true.
“Amber. Our society always seems to blame the victim, not the perpetrator, for a sexual crime. It says a woman shouldn’t dress provocatively or drink alcohol or have any kind of flirtation or interaction with a man because that means she is asking for him to do whatever he wants to do to her, even after she tells him no. Just because you were kissing him doesn’t mean you were asking for more.”
“But I followed him upstairs. I let him put me on the bed and push his hips against me. I could feel what he wanted to do.” I shuddered briefly, repulsed by the memory of that moment, repulsed by myself, for being stupid enough to let it happen.
“Nothing you did makes what Tyler did to you okay. If you told him to stop at any point that night, and he went ahead and had sex with you anyway, then what he did was rape. If you had oral sex, and after that, he forced his fingers inside you or had intercourse with you when you didn’t want it to go that far, then it was rape. If you two had been sleeping together for years, and this one time, you told him no, and he went ahead despite that, it was rape. Tyler raped you, Amber.”
I shook my head, still struggling with the guilt I felt that I’d led him on.
“You’re not responsible for this,” Vanessa continued, looking at me intently. “Yes, you were drunk. You might have kissed him. Everything about your behavior and your words might have said yes, but the moment you changed your mind, the moment you withdrew your consent either by physically struggling to get away or by telling him no, he was committing a crime. But the fact that you were drunk means that you were incapable of giving consent, so even if you hadn’t struggled or said no and he had sex with you, it was still rape.”
Her words struck a chord deep inside me. I’d never thought about the fact that being drunk had taken away my ability to give consent. Tyler should have known that. He should have realized that the state I was in made what he was doing to me wrong. Instead, he took advantage of how weak I was. He ignored my pleas for him to stop what he was doing—he let me struggle and cry and then he had sex with me anyway. Hearing Vanessa describe this as rape sounded different to me, somehow, than when my mom said it. Maybe both of them were right.
“Whether or not you decide to go to the police,” Vanessa said, “you are entitled to be furious about what Tyler did to you. To be full of fear and pain and have moments where you wish he was dead. And I am here, if you want to work through all of those complicated feelings. You just have to give me a chance.”