“Nothing can do that,” I said. I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel “right” again, whatever that meant. All I knew was that the idea of his confession and the punishment that would likely follow were the only things helping me to believe I might be able to get on with my life. Those steps had to be taken before I could find a way to move on.
We sat in silence for another moment, before Tyler used his free hand to open the truck door. Carefully, he landed on his feet on the cement below, and then looked back at me. I pulled the keys out of the ignition and handed them to him, even though I knew with his shoulder in a sling he wouldn’t be able to drive. But that wasn’t my problem to solve.
“I’m sorry,” he said, again, and then I watched as he shut the door behind him and made his way up the steps to the police station’s front doors. Part of me wanted to run after him, to make sure that he recounted every moment of what he’d done, but another part of me knew that I couldn’t stand to hear it. What happened that night already played on a constant cycle inside my head; I didn’t need any help remembering the details. I didn’t need to hear them from Tyler’s point of view. All I needed was the knowledge that he was headed inside that building in order to set the record straight. He was going to tell the truth.
Tyler
Three weeks after I walked into the police station and turned myself in for raping Amber, I made my way inside Bellingham Towers, where I had an appointment with my attorney, Peter Thompson, whom my mom had hired as soon as I called her and said that I’d signed a document waiving my right to have a lawyer present during my confession. Hours later, after an officer had led me into a small room and recorded every word I said about what I’d done to Amber on the Fourth of July, second-degree rape charges were filed against me, and after one night in jail, my mom bailed me out and introduced me to Peter.
Today, I was headed to his office in order to discuss the plea bargain he’d been offered by the district attorney, and though I was determined not to let my anxiety get the better of me, I could still feel it surging in uncomfortable sparks beneath my skin. As I opened the single, smoked-glass door that led to the reception area of his office, my heart banged inside my chest, and I wished hard for a Valium to steady my nerves.
“Hi, Tyler,” Peter’s receptionist, Jane, said when she looked up from her desk and saw me. She was a short, skinny woman, likely in her late fifties, who wore red-framed glasses, and whose silver hair stuck straight up in messy spikes on top of her head. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Better, thanks,” I said, trying to smile, even though my lips trembled. The sling I’d worn since the morning at the hospital in Monroe came off a week ago, and though the wound still ached and itched as it healed, the pain was manageable with Tylenol. Every time I looked at it, though, every time I took in the red, puckered skin around the dark scab that had formed, I was reminded of Amber’s face just moments before she shot me—the pure, rancorous anger in her hollowed-out eyes. I remembered the terrible pain that I had caused her. And even though I was terrified of what might happen to me next, I tried to hold on to the fact that at least I’d done what she asked—I’d given her the one thing that she needed most.
“Peter’s ready for you,” Jane said, nodding in the direction of his office. “Would you like anything to drink? Coffee or water?”
I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’m good.” I wondered if it was difficult for her, as a woman, when her boss represented a client like me, who had confessed to committing a rape. The few times I’d been to Peter’s office, she had never been anything but polite, but I couldn’t help but think that she was probably just a good actress. I bet she went home and had a drink to blur out the uglier portions of her job.
I turned right and headed down the narrow hallway that led to Peter’s office. “Hey,” I said, as I entered the room and shut the door behind me.
“Good morning,” Peter said. He stood up from his sleek glass-and-chrome desk, and walked around it in order to shake my hand. He was a little shorter than me, not quite six feet, with the body of a college football player who had lately spent more time on the couch than in the gym. He was fighting a receding hairline, and wore a blue suit and shiny black loafers. “How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I said, as I dropped into one of the two high-backed, black leather chairs that sat closest to the door. I should have said I wasn’t okay. I should have said that I was about to crawl out of my skin, wondering whether or not I was going to end up in prison. “As good as can be expected, I suppose.”
“I take it you heard from your captain?” Peter asked as he returned to his own seat, across from me.
“Yeah,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “He fired me.” I’d gotten the call a few days before, after Captain Duncan had been contacted by the D.A., who informed him of the charges filed against me. The conversation had been short, less than two minutes, at the end of which my captain told me that I wasn’t welcome back at the station—he would have someone clean out my locker and send me my things.
“Well, we expected that, right? The law doesn’t allow for you to be a sex offender and a paramedic, too.”
“I guess,” I said, flinching at the use of the term “sex offender.” No matter how hard I tried, I still couldn’t believe that’s what I’d become. “But that doesn’t make it any easier. That job was my life. It’s all I had.”
Peter shrugged, and I shifted in my seat, feeling my face flush, suddenly furious that he could just brush off my entire career with a roll of his shoulders. What if someone came along and took his job away? How would he feel, then? Knock it off, I thought. This isn’t Peter’s fault. You did this to yourself. You walked into a police station and told them what you did. I tried to focus on remaining calm as he spoke again.
“So, we have a plea bargain on the table,” he said, glancing down at the open file in front of him on his desk. “They’ll reduce the charge to rape in the third degree instead of second—”
“What’s the difference again?” I said, interrupting him. He’d explained it to me at our first appointment, but I couldn’t recall the distinction now.
“Second degree is a Class A felony, punishable by up to life in prison and a fifty-thousand-dollar fine,” Peter said, looking back up at me. “Third degree is a Class C felony, and gives us the option of a lower fine and negotiating for little or no jail time, depending on the circumstances of the rape.”
“Oh,” I said. “So you negotiated?”