Still, every doorway holds an opportunity, and inside the exam room there were two.
It was another carefully muted room, not like the bus terminal where I see my gynecologist at the HMO. Pale wood. Beige-on-beige, a subtle cloud pattern embossed on the wallpaper. There was a computer in a corner and an examination chair in the center where you could sit up and look into your nurse’s eyes. Her mom would be relieved to know that Juliana did not have to lie back on a paper-covered table with stirrups.
“You’re worried about being able to have a baby.” Nancy was close, maintaining eye contact. “You’re worried about the injuries inside your vagina. I’ll have a better idea when I take a look. I’ll tell you what I see. I’ll never withhold information. I’ll always tell you the truth.” Juliana scanned the room.
“How … are you going to look?”
“Oh!” said Nancy brightly. “We’re going to see it all right here on this screen,” and she patted a monitor on a cart, which held a VCR and a video camera. “If you want to watch, I’ll explain it to you as I go. But that comes later.” Later, Nancy would explain to me it was a colposcope, a camera at the end of a long stalk that magnifies sixteen times. She would flick switches and point the lens at the pattern on a sheet covering the examination chair, slowly zooming in on a teardrop-shaped paisley, and I would watch on the monitor as the paisley became a country with green boundaries, a continent of blue, a universe of emptiness; until we were looking at the spaces between the cotton threads.
Later, we three strangers would become linked by the shared sight on the TV screen of the lacerations inside Juliana’s vagina — invisible to the naked eye but vast as crimson canyons when magnified — and deep, mysterious half-moon cuts in a row.
The livid marks of a man’s fingernails.
But now Nancy broke the seal on a rape kit and began to unpack white envelopes for evidence collection.
Step one was
Step two was
Step three was
Step four was
There would be nine steps in all.
“Would you feel comfortable taking off the scarf?”
The girl unwound the material, revealing a necklace of watercolor bruises in wine and black.
“How did that happen?” Nancy asked without any kind of inflection, which might have indicated outrage or alarm. Obvious marks of strangulation are rare.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Can you open that sweatshirt a little and sit here, and I’ll take your vital signs?”
The ER doctor had ordered X rays to rule out fractures of the larynx and scans to check for soft tissue damage. The bruises would be photographed, and analysis would show the suspect had used a metal chain as a ligature to strangle Juliana several times to the point of unconsciousness or almost death. When she revived, he would perform sex acts and then strangle her again.
As Nancy pressed the disk of the stethoscope to Juliana’s chest she smiled tenderly and said, “You have a kind heart.”
My knees buckled.
I felt an unreasonable amount of love for Nancy Reicher, RN, NP, with the plucked eyebrows.
“Let’s come over here and take off your clothes. We’re going to need to keep them for evidence, so afterward”—Nancy opened a cabinet—“you can go home in one of these.”
Inside were shelves of royal blue sweatshirts and sweatpants and rubber thongs in ascending sizes.
“There may be evidence on your clothes. Dirt or fibers, stuff like that. We need you to undress carefully. I’m going to put down some pieces of paper on the floor to collect anything that falls out of your clothing, and then we’re going to collect everything you have on and put it in this bag. Let’s go behind the curtain.” She drew some fabric across a track so a quarter of the room was hidden. I stood by the counter looking over the evidence packets. It would be a slow and meticulous examination. The oral cavity. The swabs for sperm. Examination of the buttocks, perianal skin and anal folds. Drawing blood to test for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The careful cataloguing, signing, dating, sealing of every piece to maintain the chain of custody.
“I need your underwear, too,” I heard Nancy say from inside the curtain. “Are you okay?”
How many times was she going to ask if Juliana was okay? I was aware that my pits were damp. I was thirsty and wanted someplace to sit down.
“Now I’m going to use a long-wave ultraviolet light called a Wood’s lamp,” came Nancy’s voice. “All kinds of stains show up that we couldn’t see under white light. We’re going to scan your body for evidence. But first I’m going to turn out the lights. Are you all right out there, Ana?” “Fine.”
The windowless room went pitch black.
Inside the curtain a purple light went on.
“I’m just going to scan your body with this lamp.”
It was hot and close and surreal in that room. Shades of purple light danced above and below the curtain like a gruesome attraction in a carnival of perversions.
“It’s like a black light,” Nancy was explaining. “Do you know if he ejaculated outside your body?”
I could not hear Juliana’s reply.
“Well, here are some dried secretions, and you can tell they’re semen because they turn yellow under the Wood’s lamp. I’m just going to swab it. Turn around for me. Thanks.” There was a pause. Then, “Would you mind if I asked Ana to see this?” Juliana’s voice was faint with exhaustion. “Yeah, sure, I don’t care.”
With the chill clatter of metal rollers, Nancy slowly swept the curtain aside, and I saw Juliana Meyer-Murphy standing naked in a violet column of light.
She had her father’s slope-shouldered slump, with his tendency to spread at the hips, but the long legs were her mother’s; soon the baby fat would go. They had put clean dressings over the area on her chest where the offender had cut meticulously with a fine instrument, crosshatching, like an etching, to draw a steady beading of blood. On the Tanner classification of sexual maturity, a five being a fully mature adult woman, Juliana would rate a four. She had no pubic hair, not because it had not developed but because it had been shaved off; you could see the raw raking furrows of the razor.
Under the tinctures created by the lamp — cobalt, ultramarine, magenta, rose — her body looked like a Romantic sculpture splattered by a madman in a purple haze. It made me feel ashamed to see her so exposed, and yet I kept on looking, because the more I looked, the more I could see the assault in progress, as if it had been conjured.
“What kind of shoes did the assailant wear?” I asked.
“I have no clue.”
“Were they sneakers? Sandals? Boots?”
I already knew the answer.
“Boots,” breathed the girl.
She was right. “Anything special you remember about them?”
“They were clean.”
“New?”
“Polished.”
I nodded.
“Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“I was thinking you might want a forensic photographer to document this,” Nancy suggested.
“Yes, I would.”
Blunt-force injuries such as those sustained by hammers or shoes create rapid tissue compression, which results in bruising and bleeding below the skin. The contusions on Juliana’s back would have been clearly visible to the naked eye, but the impression of the weapon used to cause them would not. Now, out of the anarchistic
