I begged her. Throat raw, tears running, I begged her.
“I have no choice,” she said. “I am sorry. Nobody wants to make anything worse for you, but this is important.” Dr. Kerrow looked up at my mother, and then said, “Although, you know, I’m sure the school has already reported. You’ve talked to them?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mom. “They are well aware.”
The doctor returned to me, and set a hand on my shoulder. I noticed this because it was something my mother did not do—she did not touch me much that summer. We had never been a family of huggers, but now I wondered if there was judgment in the withholding, or fear. Dr. Kerrow said, “Your headmaster will already have called the police. He is mandated by the same law I am. So they will already know everything I have to say. Nothing will happen that isn’t already happening.”
“Then you don’t have to tell them,” I tried.
She was firm, and gave me another piece of news. “You were fifteen, and that makes you a minor. In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t heard from the police or child welfare by now. Have you?”
Mom shook her head.
“Well, you will. I am so sorry.”
I felt betrayed by this kind lady in the white coat. She had stickers on her stethoscope for the littlest kids. There seemed no end to how many mistakes I could make, how much worse I could make my life. Telling my mother, starting this cascade—the police? The state? All anyone needed to know was that I was ruined. There was nothing more to see or learn.
The car ride home was particularly awful. Anytime I was alone with Mom, that summer, I burned.
“Well,” said Mom, eyes straight ahead, “I’m glad that’s done.”
I could not make sense of comments such as this. She spoke as though there were a trajectory here, some linear logic. I was engulfed.
I would not have said much in reply. My throat was killing me. Mom, manicured fingers on the wheel, would have run her other hand over her mahogany hair, ending with a strand for idle twisting. Her beauty had not even considered beginning to fade. She was forty-one that summer, younger than I am now.
Our squat little pediatrics office, an energy-efficient shoebox from the seventies, was becoming part of a “health care complex.” Giant construction vehicles dug and clawed behind the fences. Alongside a pillared assisted living facility, developers had put in a fake pond and a fake path between transplanted trees. Mom pointed this out. I thought that if I had to get so old and sick that I had to live in a place like that, I’d rather it be in a meadow. What was wrong with the meadow?
How sour I’d become. Rolling betrayal like a candy in my mouth. Whether I had betrayed everyone I loved or the world had betrayed me, I couldn’t tell. It all felt the same. Everything in flames. The neat arithmetic of two-parent Protestant diligence left me nowhere to put catastrophes such as this, a battery of STD testing at the old pediatrics office where I’d gotten my ears pierced three years before. I remembered all the times I’d been a passenger on this winding lane. The woozy ride with a fever or the agony before shots. I remembered the time Mom sped wildly because my brother had cut his finger on a biscuit tin. His baby blanket was soaked in blood and he was eating the crackers Mom had given him to distract him—large table crackers blooming pink like carnations in his hands. I was in the middle seat, unbuckled. It was great fun, peeling around the turns. I had said so, and Mom had scowled at me. Because my brother wasn’t crying (the tin had cut him without his noticing), I hadn’t bothered to think about why we were going fast. I just loved the ride.
Mom was excited about the idea of the Concord Police knowing what had happened to me. I don’t think she’d known that the school was required to report to them.
“Wait till the rector takes that call,” she said. “It’ll be good to have law enforcement involved, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t imagine what would be good about this.
“Don’t you?”
What had I imagined would happen once I told her? Nothing. I had failed to anticipate and now I’d lost control. People were taking it up and carrying it forward. There was nothing I could do to stop it.
The report of a sexual assault triggered blood tests and criminal reports—a forensic process that followed my disclosure of the event, my representation of what had happened to me, in the only words I could find and at the only time I could manage. The witness lights up the grid of response. Which means feeling responsible not only for what happened to you, but for everything that follows, too.
It was strange, because none of my parents’ calls were being returned. They’d left a message for Ms. Shay, my fourth-form adviser, because Mom had always felt a special affinity with her and had thought it mutual. They’d called my fifth-form adviser, Mrs. Fenn. They’d called Reverend S. again. Nobody called back.
On the suggestion of Dr. Kerrow, Mom made an appointment for me with a rape crisis counselor. She found this person about forty-five minutes away, in Evanston, working out of a women’s center at Northwestern University. I drove there myself in Dad’s little stick-shift car. Though the cast was off my hand, I couldn’t grip with much force, particularly when the gear stick was rattling with highway speed, so instead I just bumped the stick in and out of gear with the base of my palm, the way my father did.
The counselor’s office was in a small cottage behind a tidy lawn. I parked on the street. Walking in, I pretended to myself that I was a college student entering the
