Detective Harrison began. ‘Let’s start with this. Do you know the person who did this to you?’
Chloe shook her head.
‘Was it one person or more than one?’
‘Slowly, ‘Just one.’
‘Do you think you would be able to recognize him again if you saw him? I’ll bring in a police sketch artist to work with you…’
Tears flowed down Chloe’s cheeks. She shook her head, her voice barely audible, ‘No. He had on a mask.’
Michael made a noise that sounded like a snort. Under his breath, ‘Mother-fucking bastard…’
‘Please, Mr Decker… ‘ Detective Harrison’s voice was cutting.
Detective Sears’s face was stone. ‘What kind of mask?’
‘He wore a rubber clown mask. I couldn’t see his face.’
Detective Harrison continued gently. ‘That’s okay, Chloe. Just tell us what you remember. Take your time.’
She couldn’t stop the tears now, and they streamed down her face. Her body started to tremble, slightly at first and then uncontrollably more violent. ‘I was sleeping. There was this voice in my dream, I think he called me Beany. I tried to wake up, I tried.’
She raised her hands to her face and saw the gauze-wrapped wrists. Then she remembered the rope and cringed. ‘But he grabbed my hands and then he tied me up and I couldn’t… I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t scream… he had something in my mouth.’ She touched her fingers to her lips, still tasting the dry, soft silk, heavy on her tongue. She could feel herself gagging, and it was hard to breathe again.
‘He put something in my mouth, then he had my
arms and my feet and I just couldn’t move anywhere. I couldn’t move…’ She looked away from Detective Harrison and reached for Michael’s hand, to steady the shaking, but he had turned back toward the window, hands fisted.
I just wish you had let me stay with you last night
Detective Harrison glanced in Michael’s direction, reached over and touched Chloe’s arm. ‘A lot of rape victims blame themselves, Chloe. But you need to know that it is not your fault. Nothing that you did or didn’t do could have prevented this.’
‘He knew things. He knew where my candles were, there, in the drawer. He lit my candles, and, I… I just couldn’t move!’
‘Did he say anything to you, Chloe? Can you remember what he said?’
‘Oh my God. Yes, yes, yes, that was the worst thing. He kept talking to me like he
knew
me.’ She could not stop shaking, and sobbing wracked her shoulders. ‘He knew everything, everything. He said he was always watching me and said he would always be near me. Always. He knew about my vacation to Mexico last year, he knew Michael’d been over on Tuesday, he knew my mother’s name, my favorite restaurant, he knew I missed my gym class on Wednesday. He knew everything!’ Pain ripped through her breasts, and she now remembered why.
‘He had a knife, he just cut off my pajamas and then he… he cut me. I could feel him slice my skin open and I couldn’t move. Then he was on top of me and…
‘Michael, please, I couldn’t move! I kept trying, but I just could not move. I couldn’t get him off of me!’ She screamed it until her voice went completely hoarse.
Detective Harrison sighed and slowly stroked Chloe’s arm, repeating herself that Chloe was not to blame. Detective Sears exhaled a deep breath and shook his head. Then he flipped to the next page in his notebook.
Chloe, sobbing, looked over for Michael, but he was still turned away toward the window, with his fists clenched and his back to her.
13
It was pouring rain on the Tuesday afternoon when Chloe was finally released from Jamaica Hospital. Just five days after she’d been wheeled in unconscious on a stretcher, Dr Broder came in her flower-filled room and announced with a broad smile that Chloe was now ‘fine’ and was being discharged that afternoon. The news had frightened her – she’d had the shakes all day, and her heart raced as the time of her discharge approached.
Her mother had finally heeded her advice and ignored the real estate section of the
New York Times
and instead had focused on the paper’s obituary section. Within two days she had found Chloe a one-bedroom apartment on the eighteenth floor of the North Shore Towers, a high-rise building in Lake Success, just over the Queens-Nassau county line. It had belonged to a ninety-year-old widow and her seventeen-year-old cat, Tibby. Unfortunately for Tibby, the widow had passed on before he did. Chloe, with the help of two new Ben Franklins, was able to have it right away. Her mom said she thought it was nice, for a New York apartment.
Chloe never wanted to return to Apartment 1B, Rocky Hill Road. Never. She never wanted to see Bayside again. Except for Pete the Parakeet, she never wanted to see anything from her apartment again, and especially anything from the bedroom. From her hospital bed, she told her parents to sell it all, burn it all, give it all away. She just did not care, as long as nothing and no one, including
Michael or her parents, made the trip directly from her old apartment to her new one.
She knew that Michael thought she was being more than a little paranoid. The idea of her rapist waiting, watching, and following people to find out where Chloe would be moving to seemed, to him, far-fetched. He agreed that she should move out of Bayside, but he could not understand why she did not just move in with him. And he simply refused to give up his Manhattan apartment.
‘Chloe, do you know how hard it is to get a rent-controlled apartment in the eighties?’ he had asked. ‘I had to search for eighteen months before I found this one.’
Explaining her reasoning to him was almost demeaning. ‘Michael, he knows
everything.
He knows all about me and he knows all about you. He’s probably followed me from your place or he’s followed you home. Maybe he was
your
neighbor, and he followed me from
your
apartment. And maybe you are willing to take a chance for a stupid “rent-controlled apartment in the eighties”, but I’m not. And I am not going there again. Ever. I just can’t believe that you can’t see any of this!’
The conversation had been heated. Too heated. She had started to cry, he had sighed too loudly. To stop her tears, he promised to ‘see what he could do’, but it would just be impossible for him to move right away. Then he suggested that they instead work on finding her a new apartment out of Bayside. He had stepped outside the room to make a quick phone call and after about ten minutes, returned and announced that he had to go back to his office. A bouquet of flowers had arrived two hours later with a note that simply said, ‘With love, Michael.’ That was Friday. He then worked all weekend.
So Chloe’s mom had found her the apartment at the North Shore Towers, its windows high above the ground. It offered a single woman in the city the best of amenities: a doorman; double-bolted doors; an alarm system with motion detectors; and, a deluxe intercom system. By Sunday her parents had moved in her television, her kitchen table and chairs, and Pete. Everything else they picked up new at Sears. On Monday the Salvation Army arrived at Rocky Hill Road with their big red van. Two muscled male workers pushed past what remained of the yellow crime scene tape left dangling from the doorjamb of Apartment 1B, and gratefully hauled away the rest of what remained of Chloe’s life’s belongings. They left a receipt on the empty living room floor. And on a rainy, gray Monday afternoon, as a few curious neighbors looked on, her life in Bayside, Queens, quietly ended. Her father told her that Marvin, her neighbor upstairs, sent his regards.
Her parents, of course, had tried to convince her to move back to California. Anywhere in California would do. Anywhere out west, in fact. Anywhere but New York City. Chloe had raised the subject with Michael, but he had just as quickly dismissed the idea. His career, her firm, his family, their life together – everyone and everything was in New York. So she had lied and told her parents that they were both toying with the idea, but she needed to take the New York Bar first and start at her new firm, where she’d already made a commitment. Then she made an all-important-sounding speech about how she wasn’t going to let this maniac ruin her life or run her out of town. Blah, blah, blah. Chloe hoped she actually meant what she said.
In truth, she did not know what she wanted anymore.
What had seemed so important only five short days ago now seemed utterly trivial. The bar exam, a new job, an engagement. She jealously watched television from her hospital bed as the world went on as normal, as if nothing at all had happened. People fighting the usual rush-hour traffic in the morning, and then fighting it back home again at night, just struggling to commute. And on TV, the news anchors, busily reporting the world’s comings and goings, as if these were major newsworthy events.
If you’re headed to the Island, avoid construction on the LIE and delays on the Grand Central Parkway. Tom Cruise is appearing at a star-studded Hollywood premiere in Los Angeles. Another boatload of Cuban refugees is found off the coast of Key West, Florida. Please help the starving children of the world. Unfortunately, folks, the weekend weather calls for continued thunderstorms. Sorry, boaters, better luck next weekend when drier air looks like it’ll move on in.
It made her want to scream.
The police guard who had stood by her room for the first two days was now gone and, she assumed, had been reassigned to protect yet another victim. Detective Sears had told Chloe that the guard was taken off her room because she was no longer considered in ‘imminent danger’. And although the police were ‘actively hunting the perpetrator’ and ‘following up on all possible leads’, by Monday, Detective Harrison had stopped her daily visits to Chloe’s hospital room, choosing instead to call in once a day to see how she was doing. Chloe suspected that within a few days, the phone calls, too, would trickle off, as her case was shuffled aside to make room for the new arrivals.
Her hospital room overflowed with the many baskets
of fragrant flowers that had been sent by well-meaning friends, acquaintances, and associates, but still she couldn’t bring herself even to say hello to anyone on the telephone. Other than Marie, Chloe did not want to see friends. She didn’t want anyone to see her bandages, and then wonder about all the horrible things that must have happened to her to warrant so many of them. She didn’t want to talk about that night, but she also didn’t want to make idle chitchat with the curious. After that, she realized, there really was not much to say. She wanted to go back in time, to simply be Chloe again, with all the normal problems and tedious chores that seemed to plague her on any given day, but she knew that that was no longer possible. She hated him for that most of all. He had taken her life, and she did not know how to get it back.
Michael remained at the office, stopping at the hospital on Monday for an hour at lunchtime. She knew that the hospital made him uncomfortable. She knew that seeing her bandages and her IVs, and her medicines and her doctors and her physical therapist only made him feel frustrated and helpless. She knew that the whole
incident,
as he was calling it, made him angry. But somehow she really didn’t care anymore how
he
felt about anything. And it made her more than just angry at the thought that his life was going on as normal, as if nothing had happened, when in fact, everything had happened and nothing would ever be the same again for either of them.
Now it was Tuesday and she could finally go home, something she thought she wanted, yet ever since Dr Broder had told her she was to be discharged, she couldn’t stop shaking. Michael was supposed to come for
the discharge, but he’d gotten tied up in a complicated deposition all afternoon. So it was her mom and Marie who wheeled her to the front lobby where her dad’s rental car stood waiting just outside. She was able to walk, but the wheelchair was hospital policy until she was placed in the car.
The elevator doors opened to the first-floor lobby, and Marie pushed her into the busy hall. People were everywhere. Old folks sat on benches in the corner, and police officers lingered at the reception desk. Distraught parents held crying children, and nurses and hospital personnel crossed the floor to and from the elevator bays.
Chloe’s eyes quickly scanned the lobby looking for any sign of him. Some people stared at her in her wheelchair, idly curious. She watched their eyes closely, their body movements. Some were engaged in conversations, others had their heads buried in papers, and still others looked straight ahead at nothing in particular. Her eyes frantically searched them all. Her heart pumped fast, and she felt the surge of adrenaline. The unfortunate and desperate truth was, though, that his could be any one of the many pairs of eyes that she was looking at. She would not know him without his mask.
Just the simple step from the wheelchair to the car brought searing pain to her abdomen. With her mom and Marie’s help, she carefully climbed into the backseat, her shopping bag of prescription drugs in hand. She looked out the rain-streaked car window into the vast parking lot. Next stop was busy Northern Boulevard, and then they would hit the Long Island Expressway, which was always crowded with cars. So many faces, so many strangers. He could be anywhere. He could be anyone.
‘Are you all set back there, honey?’ A pause. ‘Beany?’
her dad asked gently, obviously waiting for an answer.
‘Yeah, Dad, I’m ready to go.’ She hesitated and then added quietly, ‘Daddy, please don’t call me that anymore.’
He seemed sad. Then he nodded soberly and watched as his daughter turned her tired face back toward the window. He pulled the Ford Taurus away from the lobby overhang, and the car made its way through the crowded parking lot and on to Atlantic Avenue. Chloe stared out the window as they traveled to her new apartment in Lake Success, passing alongside any number of cars, any number of strangers, with Jamaica Hospital fading farther and farther behind them in the driving rain.
14
Chloe told herself each morning in the mirror:
Just make it through today and tomorrow will surely be better.
But the tomorrows only seemed to be getting worse. The fear inside her kept growing like an uncontrollable cancer even as her wounds healed and the jagged scars began to fade. Insomnia plagued her nights; debilitating fatigue, her days.