It was December twenty-fifth. Consequently, that day came every year, and I wished to hell it wouldn’t. You couldn’t get rid of Christmas. And even if you could, all of the hopeful people in the world would find a new day to celebrate, with their cheap tinsel and stuffed turkeys and lawn ornament bullshit. And I’d be forced to hate that day, too. Turkey was disgusting anyway. Anyone with taste buds could tell you that. It tasted like sweat and had the texture of wet paper. The entire holiday was a joke; Jesus had to share it with Santa. The only thing worse was that Jesus had to share Easter with a bunny. That was just creepy. But at least Easter had ham.
My annual tradition on Christmas was to wake up with the fog and jog along Lake Washington. It helped me deal. Not just with Christmas, with life. Plus, jogging was a shrink-approved activity. I didn’t see shrinks anymore, but I still jogged. It was a healthy way to produce enough endorphins to keep my demons in their respective cages. I thought there were drugs for that—but, whatever. I liked to run.
On the morning of that Christmas, I didn’t feel like jogging my usual route along the lake. A person might hate Christmas, but still feel the necessity to do something significant on it. I wanted to be in the woods. There is something about trees the size of skyscrapers, their bark dressed in moss, that makes me feel hopeful. I’d always thought that if there was a god, the moss would be his fingerprints. Grabbing my iPod, I headed out the door around six a.m. It was still dark, so I took my time walking to the trail, giving the sun some time to rise. To get to the trail I had to cut through a neighborhood of cookie cutter houses called The Glen. I was resentful of The Glen. I had to drive past it to get to my house, which was at the top of the hill.
I glanced in windows as I passed the houses, eyeing the Christmas lights and trees, wondering if you’d be able to hear the children from the sidewalk while they were opening presents. I stretched just outside of the woods, turning my face toward the winter drizzle. That was my routine; I’d stretch, will myself to live for another day, secure my ponytail, and let the beat of my legs begin. The trail is bumpy and precipitous. It borders the cookie cutter Glen, which I find ironic. The whole thing has been rutted by time and rain, woven with rogue tree roots and sharp flints. It took concentration just to make it through in the daylight without a sprained ankle, which was precisely the reason it had few joggers. I don’t know what I was thinking running it while it was still dark. I realized that I should have stuck to the plan of jogging around the lake. I should have stayed home. I should have done anything but jog that trail, on that morning, at that time.
At 6:47 he raped me.
I know this because seconds before I felt arms wrapping around my upper body, crushing the breath from my lungs, I glanced at my watch and saw 6:46. I figure it took him thirty seconds to drag me backward off the trail, my legs kicking the air uselessly. Another thirty seconds to throw me down at the base of a tree and rip off my clothes. Two seconds to hit me hard across the face. A minute to turn the sum of my life into a violent stained memory. He took what he wanted and I didn’t scream. Not when he grabbed me, not when he hit me, not when he raped me. Not even after, when my life was irrevocably soiled.
After, I stumbled out of the woods, my pants half pulled up and blood trickling into my eyes from a cut on my forehead. I ran looking over my shoulder, and right into another jogger who had just gotten out of his car. He caught me as I fell. I didn’t need to say anything, because he immediately pulled out his phone and called the police. He opened his passenger side door and helped me sit, then turned the heat on full blast. He had an old blanket in the trunk that he said he used for camping. He said lots of things in the ten minutes we waited for the police. He was trying to set me at ease. I didn’t really hear him, though the sound of his voice was a soothing constant. He wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and asked if I wanted water. I didn’t but I nodded. He announced that he was opening the back door to get it. He told me everything he did before he did it.
I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Once there I was wheeled to a private room and handed a hospital gown by an orderly. A nurse came in a few minutes later. She looked harried and distracted, the hair above her ears sticking out in tufts. “We’re going to administer an SOEC kit, Ms. Richards,” she said, without looking at me. When I asked what that was, she told me it was Sexual Offense Evidence Collection.
My humiliation was high as she pried my legs open. The SOEC kit was on a metal table that she’d wheeled next to the bed. I watched her unpack it, laying each item out on a tray. There were several small boxes, microscope slides and plastic bags, and two large white envelopes, which she slipped my clothes into. I started shaking when she took out a small blue comb, a nail pick and cotton swabs. That’s when I averted my eyes to the ceiling, squeezing them shut so tight I saw gold stars on the inside of my eyelids.
Please no, God. Please no.
I wondered if the words
sexual assault
made women feel less victimized. I hated it. I hated all the words people were using. The cop who had brought me in whispered the word
raped
to the nurse. But to me it had been sexual assault. They were off brands of the real deal.
The kit took two hours. When she was finished, I was told to sit up. She handed me two white pills in a little paper cup. “For the discomfort,” she said.
Discomfort.
I repeated the word in my head as I dropped the pills on my tongue and took the paper cup of water she was now extending. I was too shocked to be offended. A female officer came in when the nurse was finished to talk to me about what happened. I gave her a description of the man: heavyset, mid-thirties, taller than me, but shorter than the officer, a skull cap pulled over his hair, which might have been brown. No tattoos that I could see … no scars. When the nurse was finished, she asked if there was anyone they could call. I said,
No.
An officer would give me a ride home. I stopped short when I saw the man at the nurses’ station. The jogger—the one who’d helped me—was wearing a white doctor’s coat over his sweatpants and t-shirt, and flipping through what I presumed was my chart. It’s not like he didn’t already know what happened to me, but I still didn’t want him to read it on my chart.
“Ms. Richards,” he said. “I’m Doctor Asterholder. I was there when—”
“I remember,” I said, cutting him off.
He nodded. “I’m not on duty today,” he confessed. “I came in to check on you.”
To check on me? I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. A woman? A soiled woman? Sorrow? A face to pin pity on?
“I understand you need a ride home. The police can take you,” he glanced at the uniformed officer who was standing off to the side. “But I’d like to drive you if that’s okay.”
Nothing was okay. But, I didn’t say that. Instead, I thought about the way he knew exactly what to do and what to say to keep me calm/ He was a doctor; in hindsight it all made sense. If I could choose my ride home, I choose not to ride in the back of a police cruiser.
I nodded.
He glanced at the cop who seemed more than happy to hand me off. A rape case on Christmas Day, who wanted to be reminded that there was evil in the world while Santa and his reindeer were still leaving contrails in the sky?
Dr. Asterholder walked me out a side door and into a staff parking lot. He’d offered to pull around the front of the building to pick me up, but I’d shaken my head firmly. His car was nondescript. The unflashy hybrid. It looked a little self-righteous. He opened the door for me, waited until my feet were tucked in … closed it … walked around to his side. I stared out the window at the rain. I wanted to apologize for ruining his Christmas. For getting raped in the first place. For making him feel as if he had to drive me home.
“Your address?” he asked. I pulled my eyes away from the rain.
“1226 Atkinson Drive.” His hand hovered over the GPS before moving back to the steering wheel.
“The stone house? On the hill—with the vines on the chimney?”
I nod. My house was noticeable from all across the lake, but he must live near if he’d seen it close enough to know about the vines.
“I live in the area,” he said a moment later. “It’s a beautiful house.”
“
Yes,” I said absently. I suddenly felt cold. I lifted my hands to my arms to catch the goose bumps, and he turned up the heat without me asking. I saw a family crossing the parking lot, each with an armful of presents. All four of them were wearing Christmas hats, from the toddler to the beer-bellied father. They looked hopeful.
“Why aren’t you with your family on Christmas?” I asked him.
He pulled out of the lot and turned onto the street. It was one o’clock on Christmas Day so, for once, there was no traffic.
“I moved here from Raleigh two months ago. My family is back East. I couldn’t get enough time off to go see them. Plus hospitals are short staffed on Christmas. I was scheduled to come in later today.”
I looked out the window again.
There was silence for a few miles, and then I said, “I didn’t scream … maybe if I’d screamed—”
“You were in the woods, and it was Christmas morning. There was no one to hear you.”
“But I could have tried. Why didn’t I try?”
Dr. Asterholder looked at me. We were at a light, so he could. “Why didn’t I get there sooner? Just ten minutes and I could have saved you…”
My shock drew me out. For a minute I was a different Senna. Appalled, I said, “It’s not your fault.”
The light turned green, the truck ahead of us pulled forward. Before Dr. Isaac Asterholder put his foot on the gas, he said, “It’s not yours either.”
The drive from the hospital to my house is roughly ten minutes. There are three traffic lights, a brief stint on the highway, and a steep, winding hill that makes even the toughest car have bad labor pains. Chopin was playing softly from the speakers as the doctor drove me home the rest of the way in silence. His car interior was cream; soothing. He pulled into my driveway and immediately got out to open my door. I had to remind myself to move, to walk, to put my keys into the lock. It all took conscious effort, as if I was controlling my limbs from outside my body—a puppet master and a puppet at the same time. And maybe I was not in my body. Maybe the real me kept running on that trail, and what he grabbed was a different part. Maybe you could detach from the ugly things that happened to you. But even as I opened the door I knew it wasn’t true. I felt too much fear.
“Do you want me to check the house?” Dr. Asterholder asked. His eyes moved past me into the foyer. I looked at him, grateful for the suggestion and also afraid of letting him in. In all respects, he was the man who saved me, yet I was still looking at him like he could attack me at any minute. He seemed to sense that. I cast my own glance into the darkness behind me, and suddenly felt too afraid to even flick on the light switch. What would be there? The man who raped me?
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” He took a voluntary step back, away from me and the house. “I’m fine with just dropping you off.”
“Wait,” I said. I was ashamed of my voice, swollen with panic. “Please check.” It took everything for me to say that, to ask for help. He nodded. I stepped aside to let him in. When you allow someone into your house to check for the boogey man, you are unwittingly letting him into your life as well.
I waited on a barstool in my kitchen while he inspected the rooms. I could hear him moving around from the bedrooms to the bathrooms, then to my office, which hung over the kitchen.
You are in shock,
I told myself. He checked each window and door. When he finished he pulled out a card from his wallet and slid it on the counter toward me.
“Call me anytime you need me. My house is a mile away. I’d like to check on you tomorrow, if that’s okay.”
I nodded.
“Do you have someone that can come over? Stay with you tonight?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
When he was gone, I pushed the sofa to the front door and wedged it between the jamb and the wall. It was no more a barrier against someone intruding than my small, ineffective fists, but it made me feel better. I undressed in the foyer, kicking off the lightweight pants and shirt the nurse gave me at the hospital after she bagged mine for evidence. Naked, I carried them to the fireplace, setting them on the floor next to me as I opened the grate and arranged the logs. I lit a fire and waited until it was hot and hungry. Then I threw everything in, and watched the worst day of my life burn.
Carrying a Brillo pad and a half-full jug of bleach to the downstairs bathroom, I turned the water to the hottest setting. The bathroom filled with steam. When the mirrors were hazed, and I couldn’t see myself, I climbed into the shower and watched my skin turn red. I scrubbed my body until my skin bled and the water turned pink around my feet. Screwing the cap off the bleach, I lifted it above my shoulders, and poured. I cried out and had to hold myself up while I did it again. Then I lay on the floor with my knees spread apart and my hips raised, and poured it into my body. They’d given me a pill, told me it would take care of an unwanted pregnancy.
Just in case,
the nurse said. But, I wanted to kill everything he touched—every skin cell. I needed to make sure there was nothing left of him on any part of me. I walked naked to the kitchen and pulled a knife from the block I kept next to the fridge. Using the tip, I ran it up and down the inside of my arm, tracing my favorite vein. Too many windows; my house had too many ways to break in. What if he’d been watching me? If he knew where I lived?
I pierced the skin with that last thought and dragged the tip about two inches. I watched the blood trickle down my arm, mesmerized by the sight. When my doorbell rang, the knife clattered to the floor.
I was so afraid, I couldn’t move. It rang again. Grabbing a dishtowel I held it over the cut on my arm and looked toward the door. If they were here to hurt me, they probably wouldn’t ring the doorbell. I grabbed for laundry basket that was resting on my kitchen counter, pulling out a clean t-shirt and jeans. They dragged stubbornly over my damp skin as I rushed to put them on. I took the knife with me. I had to push the couch aside to reach the door. When I looked through the peep hole, my hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the knife. What I saw was Doctor Asterholder, in different clothes.