“We both wanted it to be a secret. My dad wasn’t going to let me have a black boyfriend. Davey’s parents didn’t want him to have any girlfriend at all. So he took different girls to dances and I was okay with that. But he took that Sarah chick to homecoming, then went to homecoming at her school, and that wasn’t part of the deal. That’s why I got mad. We were in love, we really were. I never knew anyone like him. And, yeah, maybe at first, he liked me because I was cool with sex. But that’s not why he stayed. That’s not what he said to me. He said he loved me.”
Before or after orgasm, Lu wants to ask, but manages to keep this to herself. Why do people put so much stock in that word, love? As if no one ever uses it falsely, as if it’s always true. Love can be the biggest lie of all.
“Your brothers did their best to finish the job your father didn’t have a chance to do.”
“And one of my brothers died,” Jonnie says softly. “Everyone seems to forget that. Just because you have seven brothers doesn’t mean you don’t mind losing one. My dad was never the same. My mom, either. It tore my family apart, what happened to Ben. Tom ended up dying in a car accident a few years later, drunk and high. Both my parents were dead before I was thirty-five. That left the six of us. But we’re really tight. We have to be.”
“Ben died because he tried to kill another person—and ended up maiming him. A person who did not, by law, rape you.”
“Yeah, that’s what the law said. But who was there, who was in that room? Me and Davey. Who held who down? Who had bruises? He weighed, I don’t know, probably about two hundred pounds? I weighed a hundred and ten and wore size 3 jeans. You see, I knew what sex was like. I didn’t have any confusion about how it was supposed to go. What happened that night was rape. The fact that he was my boyfriend, that he kissed me when he was done—that didn’t change it.”
“Of course that’s what you’d say now. But the law—”
“The law? You mean your father? Well, fuck him. Big, handsome, rich Davey Robinson held down a stupid little acne-scarred slut, forced her to have sex, but no one believed her. Turns out there were all these tests, all these rules I didn’t know. ‘Did you scream?’ Sorry, I didn’t know I had to scream for it to be a crime. Next time, I’ll make sure I scream. ‘Did you struggle?’ Yeah, I struggled, for all the good it did me. I said no. But because I had said yes all the other times, no didn’t count.”
Lu believes her. Almost. Which is to say, she thinks Jonnie is telling what is now the truth in her head, but it’s a story born of thirty-five years of hindsight. Davey, the gentle giant, would never have done such a thing. Lu can see, however, that Jonnie absolutely believes what she’s saying. She has conveniently forgotten that she had a motive to lie back in 1979. She was angry at Davey. She was trying to protect her father, who had beaten her severely enough to require an ER visit. Her refusal to tell the truth about the beating benefited him.
“Davey Robinson ended up with a life sentence that the law never would have given him—paralyzed from the waist down. Didn’t that satisfy you?”
“For a while,” she says, then looks startled by her own unvarnished honesty.
Silence, a dead end. Lu, not sure what to say, asks: “What happened to Mr. Forke?”
“Oh, him. I don’t know. I was almost twenty-seven when I got married, which seemed late to me, old enough to make good choices. We had three kids, boom, boom, boom. He took off after the third one. But I raised good kids. I’m a grandma now and proud to be one. That’s Joni Rose.”
She indicates a set of three photographs in a triptych on the table next to the bright orange armchair where she sits. A baby, a toddler, a little girl, maybe four or so. All the same kid, Lu assumes. Bald as a doorknob as a baby, with one of those ridiculous headbands that proclaims, I am a girl, dammit. Still pretty wispy haired as a toddler and kid. Too bad she didn’t get Jonnie’s genes. The woman’s hair is impressive, thick and glossy.
“Did you ever see Davey again?”
“Why would I do that?”
Nonresponsive. The witness is directed to answer the question.
“Heck, you might have run into him somewhere. He still lives here.” Davey and AJ lost contact years ago. But Lu knows—anyone who reads a newspaper knows—that Davey is a minister, one of the leading opponents of Maryland’s move toward marriage equality two years ago. “He’s at the big, new superchurch in far west Howard County.”
“Well, I’m not much for churchgoing,” Nita says with a harsh laugh. “God hasn’t done too well by me and my family.”
Lu gives up, bids the woman good evening. She leaves believing that Jonnie-Nita Flood-Forke has her suspicions about why Rudy Drysdale targeted her—and has no intention of sharing them. Lu can’t force her to talk. Rudy is dead, his intent no longer important. And it would not be particularly comforting to Mary McNally’s family to learn that she was an even more random target than anyone ever dreamed.