My eyes welled up again as she spoke, and this time, I couldn’t hold back the tears. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, my voice crackling. “No one would believe me. He’s, like, the nicest guy around. He’s a paramedic. He saves people for a living. He’s never hurt anyone.”
“That you know of,” Vanessa said. “And, Amber, he hurt you. The world is full of seemingly nice guys who assault women. Guys who don’t have healthy attitudes about women and sex in general, who see sex as something they’re entitled to, who hurt women and don’t even know they’re doing it because we don’t educate our young men on how not to become rapists.”
I thought about Tyler’s parents then, about the parade of women Jason had plowed his way through over the years—the crude and sexist comments he always made around his son, and the way he constantly made Tyler feel like he would never measure up. I thought about Liz, that however nice she might be, she was also way more concerned with getting her own needs met than with meeting Tyler’s, or teaching him anything about what a healthy relationship should look like. I was certain that neither of them had ever had a conversation with Tyler about how not to rape a woman—if they had, he definitely would have told me about it. I doubted that there were many parents out there who had this kind of conversation with their sons, the same way girls are talked to about not walking alone to their cars at night, or how to not dress “suggestively” when they go out so men won’t get the “wrong idea.”
“A man doesn’t have to be evil in order to sexually assault women,” Vanessa said. “Most rapists don’t look like what we’re programmed to believe they should—they’re not greasy-haired monsters who jump out from behind the bushes and tie up their victims in their basements. More often, they’re someone’s typical father, husband, brother, or son—but what they do to women is monstrous. Just because Tyler is ‘nice’?”—here, she made air quotation marks with her fingers—“doesn’t mean he’s not capable of rape. Clearly, he is, or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”
“But what’s the point of going to the police if he won’t go to jail?” I asked. My thoughts were scrambled, pulled in a hundred different directions.
“I’m not saying you have to,” she said. “I’m happy to just help you here, in this room. But I will tell you that I’ve worked with many women who’ve been through exactly what you’re dealing with now, some of whom ultimately decided to file a report with the authorities, despite knowing the odds of getting a conviction were low.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Don’t most women just end up getting retraumatized by the judicial system, having to relive what happened to them over and over again? Their sexual histories questioned and their reputations torn apart? What’s the point of going through all of that if the guy gets away with it anyway?” My body ached, the same way it had the moment Tyler rolled off of me. I felt the stabbing sensation between my legs the same way an amputee might feel ghostly pain in a missing limb. Every time I allowed myself to think about that night, it all came rushing back—I was in that strange house, stumbling down the stairs, desperate to find a way to get home. I didn’t want to do this. I thought I was fine. But now, I found myself hoping that Vanessa would tell me there was another way, that she had a magic formula to piece my shattered insides back together. I wanted her to make me feel whole.
“The point is, that for some women, going through the process of telling their story to the authorities is cathartic. It gives them a chance to release some of the blame they point at themselves and pin it on the person who actually deserves it. And, most importantly, it creates a record, so that if their attacker ever does the same thing to another woman, there’s a better chance she’ll be taken seriously and he’ll be indicted.”
I’d never thought about the fact that Tyler might have already done this kind of thing to other girls. I hadn’t considered that he might do it again, in the future, to someone else. The full weight of these possibilities crashed down upon me, and I knew I had to do something. I knew going to the police would hurt me more than it would hurt him. There has to be something else. Some way to make him pay. And if I was sure of anything, it was that sitting in a therapist’s office, dwelling on what he did to me and whining about my feelings, wasn’t going to be it.
Tyler
It was a warm afternoon in late September, almost three months since the party on the Fourth of July, and Mason and I were working a rare day shift, covering for another paramedic team who were both down with strep throat. We had just grabbed lunch from a food truck downtown when a call came over the radio, asking us to proceed to a local park, where a ten-year-old boy had shimmied his head through the bars of a wrought-iron fence and now couldn’t get it back out.
“What the hell would possess a kid to do something like that?” I asked, as we tossed the remainder of our meal into the trash and headed back to the rig.
“He probably just wanted to see if it would fit,” Mason said.
“That’s what she said,” I quipped, hoping to get a laugh out of my partner. Things had continued to be strained between us, even though I’d done everything in my power to be more focused when I was on the job. Some days, when my mind spun with fear that Amber still might send the police to my door, when my heart raced and I felt like a fat boulder was sitting on my chest, the only way I got through work was by taking half a Valium before I got to the station. I’d made good on my promise to myself to only take it when the pressure inside me was unbearable, when I knew I was at risk of cracking on the job, so I hadn’t yet run out of the ones I took from the woman’s stash. But I was getting close, and I didn’t know what I’d do when they were gone.
Mason didn’t laugh at my stupid joke. Instead, we climbed into the ambulance, not talking as he drove us to a park on the south end of the Guide Meridian. It didn’t take long to treat the boy from the fence; the firefighters in attendance had already used bolt cutters to free him, so all we had to do was check him for serious injury, of which he had none, and then administer a couple of ice packs and ibuprofen for the slight irritation and swelling around his neck. His parents were there, too, and signed a waiver stating they didn’t want him to be taken to the ER, so after they drove off toward home, Mason and I climbed back into the ambulance, where it felt like it would take a wrecking ball to knock down the wall between us.
“Hey,” I said, hoping I could find a way to get through to him. To make things go back to the way they used to be between us. “Can we talk?”
“About what?” he asked as he stuck the keys in the ignition. He didn’t look at me.
“I don’t know, man. We used to hang out. We were friends, we joked around. Now you barely say anything to me unless it’s about the job.”