Authors: Emily Winslow
John's silence is particular. It's in between the hymns and prayers and eulogy.
After the hearing in January, when I was in agony at the lack of response from supposed friends, I'd started sharing the diary I'd been keeping, to try to get people to understand. And they did understand, at last: what I'd been through long ago, what I was going through this year, and about all of the people who were helping me. John's kindness had stood out to them. One of the first Cambridge friends to read it had replied to me with lots of love, and a fitting observation that rings in my mind now at the cathedral:
“Hats off to young John. What a very wise young man.”
Gavin is wrecked by John's death. He's fixing things all over the house: plumbing leaks and dodgy electricals. We'd had the place built new and have lived in it for eight years. It's gotten to that age that things are falling apart. He gets angry at the house, and tears of frustration pop out. I'm glad that he has something to do, and an object for his emotions.
It's worrisome that the best of what we can give each other right now is time alone. I need to write; he needs to do things with his hands. We take turns being with the kids, playing with them and supporting them, to make that happen for each other. We guard each other's solitude.
The prosecution is stretching on far too long. This added grief is too much. Gavin needs to be taken care of, too, but won't let anyone do that for him. It just makes him feel weak, which he hates. I don't know what men like this want. Being helped makes me feel powerful. Shouldn't it feel strong to have allies?
He wants to quit his stressful job, but S. is starting school soon and expensive tuition fees loom. I don't make much money from my books. We have good savings, but spending them down too far is a worry.
Double grief is isolating. If I were more sad than Gavin, he could comfort me; if he were more sad than me, I could comfort him. But we're both doubled over from it, both of us missing John.
Gavin doesn't like putting pain into words. I can't fathom that. Turning emotion into words is alchemy. It's the best power I have.
I get back to work. A retired forensic investigator, now a porter at St. John's College, meets me to talk about his old job, for research for my next novel. It's a hottish, sunny day, so we sit on a low wall in front of the wealthiest college, Trinity. Tourists waft past in dreamy groups, looking up and around. We talk about DNA analysis and fingerprint dust, in a distant, happens-to-other-people sort of way.
The university finished classes and exams weeks ago. Kids' schools are finishing now. Everyone's about to travel; us, too. The anchors of normal academic-year life are being hauled up. It feels disorienting, to suddenly lack patterns and schedules. Of course we can order life at home however we like, but the weekly cycle of private lessons, group classes, and rehearsals has come to a close. It's freeing and relaxing and a little bit lonely. There'll be no bumping into anyone for the next six weeks. Everyone I'm going to see I have to specifically ask for, and they have to say yes.
Even when people do meet up, I worry that it's out of duty, that they're secretly storing up resentment of my seemingly endless neediness.
There are two kinds of caring: selfish and selfless. They're both important.
Selfless caring is when you wish good for the other person above your own desires. It's the more generous kind of love, but without selfish love, too, it's just disinterested. Selfish caring is the love that
wants something. It's the love that sees something valuable in the other. Selfish love alone is a terrible thing; but selfless love without selfish love is bland and uninvolved. Selfless love alone is more about the lover wanting to be a good person than about the object of their love being an adored person. I like being adored.
Cambridge is full of good people, caring apparently selflessly. I'm not sure if selfish caring is in there, too, perhaps just well hidden for propriety's sake. I hope it is. I hope that people are kind at least in part because they like being close to me, not only because I need it.
People are using the word “brave” again. It drives me crazy.
I just want all of us to live in the same world. If I'm full of secrets, and always wondering how people might react if they knew, then there are too many worlds: my world, in which the prosecution is acutely important, and the world that they live in, in which it isn't happening at all. Also, there are all of the possible worlds that might come into being if they were told, worlds in which they might be disgusted or emotional or practical or angry or apathetic or freaked out, all of them different.
Telling people what's going on not only puts us all in the same world, all of us knowing; also all of those possible reactions, all those possible worlds, become just the reactions that are happening for real, just the one world that is. One shared world is manageable. A kaleidoscope of worlds and possible worlds is madness.
And it's so much less work! Dealing with actual reactions is easier than generating might-be reactions in my mind. I only have to be me; they'll do the work of being them.
It's not “brave” to do that. I'm taking what for me is the easy way.
Centamoreâ“call me Sam”âgets back to me. The extra papers didn't jog his memory, except to highlight to him, as I had already noticed, that he's the same age as Fryar, just twenty-four then.
I wonder how much Fryar remembers. Thirty-eight years is a long time.
Centamore had, it turns out, found one piece of the old police notes after all: the arrest photo. It likely had been snapped the same day as the crime. I ask to see it.
I haven't yet told him of my involvement with Fryar's Pittsburgh cases, just that I'm writing about them. It's nice to have an alternate, influential identity to use, truthfully, to not have to be a victim to him until I want to. I'll tell him eventually, but here's the honest truth: I don't want to rock the boat until he's shared everything with me. I don't want to say anything that might stop him talking.
We fly away. My grandfather's old house in New England has become my family's summer house; we meet there every year with my parents, siblings, nieces, nephews. Gavin and my brother love to fish together. Our boys love to boat. Mom mothers us all, with bed-making and dishwashing, gin and tonics and homemade potato salad. Dad brings new board-game ideas for us to test-play, and submits to using headphones when he listens to conservative talk-radio shows.
The thing about the neighborhood of our summer house is that you can't tell which houses are lived in year-round, and which are second or third homes. Gavin and I once stayed here alone with our much smaller boys in the winter of our move to England, while our furniture slowly crossed the Atlantic by ship. It was unnerving, almost post-apocalyptic, being surrounded by so many quiet, only-maybe-occupied homes, right next to the rhythmic slap of the Atlantic against empty beach.
Summers are busier: the water is full of boats, and joggers and dog walkers pass us as we dip our toes in the surf and dig idly with plastic shovels.
I read an article once, in a magazine for middle-aged women
long before I was middle-aged; maybe a
Ladies' Home Journal
or
Psychology Today,
either my mother's or my singing teacher's. It said that how well someone recovers from rape is profoundly tied to how much money they have. Translate “money” as “choice” or “control,” and that makes perfect sense. I recallâperhaps erroneouslyâthat the final thesis was that therefore poverty is a more important thing to try to fix than sexual violence. I can't say for sure if that's what it said, but that's what stuck with me. I've never been able to find it again.
Rest helps. Choice helps. Some control, well-educated communication skills, security, and small indulgences help. Therefore, money helps; I know that that's true even without the article. Travel is a way to make a change, even a big one, without sacrificing the ordinary life to which one can later return. It's the means to run away a little distance, and to still have home waiting. But it's not just money after the fact that makes a difference: money systemically in my past, helping me to grow up secure and supported in my adventures, props me up from behind.
I'm spoiled at the summer house. Gavin is relaxed here, frying fresh-caught bluefish, and hammering and drilling new wood into the old patio. Rhode Island is far removed from Cambridge, and so jars us differently, shakes out different feelings. Every year that we come back, the kids are older but still slip into young habits:
Sesame Street
in the morning,
Jeopardy!
at night, American shows that we don't get in England and which they remember, reflexively, that they used to love. Gavin and I slip into old patterns, too, ways of being that are apart from grief. We still have to spend much of our time taking turns managing the kids while the other relaxes or works, and fixing and cooking and keeping things as tidy as my mom likes them. But Gavin runs his fingers across my shoulders when he walks past me toward the dock or the kitchen; when he's the one sitting and I pass him, I kiss the top of his head. The af
fectionate habits of our sixteen years assert themselves, crisscrossed into a safety net, a big, bouncing catchall underneath us:
touch, smile, listen, speak gently.
It's a happy surprise to get an e-mail from Evan on a sunny Rhode Island morning; I'm used to having to wait till the end of the day to hear from him when I'm on British time.
I'd written to him, pointing out that, if Fryar's eventual psych eval might require some subsequent process of medication or therapy before trial, then it had better get started. I really can't cope with the trial getting pushed out any further than it already has, and there are three things that could do that, any one of them alone: a date clash with John's upcoming college memorial service next term (which the Master of the college says that he will try to avoid), a lazy defense, or a complacent prosecution. I warn Evan not to trust that Fryar will plead, no matter how sensible and seemingly predictable a plea would be. I beg him to push the defense to get on with their side, too.
He tells me that Fryar's new public defender has been assigned: her first name is Libbi with an
i
and Google tells me that she runs marathons. I think,
All right. That's fine. It's good to have someone who's organized enough and persistent enough to finish marathons.
Even though she'll be working for the other side, I need her to be good so that she'll see the case through properly. If she messes things up, that'll give Fryar grounds for appeal. If she's slow or scattered, she could give him grounds for more delays. I need for her to do this well.
Evan repeats that he can't force things to happen as scheduled, but that he's trying. He's requesting a meeting with the judge and the new attorney to make sure that all is moving forward as it should. I reassure him that I'll understand if some true surprise derails our October date; what I won't put up with is something which we should have foreseen messing things up. Everything that
we can guess we might need, we should prepare. There's no excuse for not trying hard enough, all three of us: Evan, Libbi, me.
The other thing that Google tells me about Libbi is that she recently represented the losing side in a case very similar to mine: a cold-case Shadyside rape, this one from only twelve years ago. The man in that case was sentenced to serve seventy-five to a hundred years, just for one victim.
Pittsburgh seems to have a lot of rapes, but statistically it's not the worst city I've lived in or near. According to City-Data.com, Boston (where I'd worked in the years between grad school and marriage) has a higher percentage of rapes than Pittsburgh, as does the town in New Hampshire where W. was born. The suburb in California where S. was born, and my hometown in New Jersey, are each safer.
I look for data to compare if Pittsburgh is harsher on rape than other states. I'm surprised by the number of convictions over the whole country. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were more than 14,000 felony rape convictions across the United States in 2006, and more than 10,000 of those included prison time. That's encouraging. More than 500 of those rapists were sentenced to a maximum of life.
That same report also says that 84 percent of those 2006 rape convictions were resolved by guilty plea, not trial. No wonder that's what Evan assumes will happen.
A state-by-state listing of rape sentencing guidelines compiled by the American Prosecutors Research Institute shows statutory maximums for rape, and Pennsylvania's is rather moderate at twenty years. (Pittsburgh's very high sentences come from combining rape with other related offenses, each with their own sentences.)
I note other states' maximums. These highest possible sentences for the charge of first-degree rape of an adult aren't likely sentences, nor likely to be fully served if they are given, but even just the pos
sibility is heartening. States with higher potential maximums than Pennsylvania for crimes similar to Arthur Fryar's include Alabama with ninety-nine years or “life”; Alaska with thirty years; Arkansas with forty or life; Delaware with life; Washington, DC, life; Florida, thirty years; Georgia, death.
Jesus
. I'm only up to the letter
G
.
Oklahoma also lists death as their maximum penalty for rape. Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi (“assault with intent to ravish”), Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia each list a life sentence as their maximum. More than half a dozen other states have maximum sentences less than life but of significantly more than Pittsburgh's twenty years.
Further research tells me that death sentences for rape don't actually go through, and I wouldn't want them to, but I appreciate the value that such potential punishments place on the victim.
Dramatic, oversized sentences are wonderful to me, even if they can't actually be fully served, as in my case because of Fryar's old age. The extra years that he'll never live to give to prison are still useful, as points in the game. They say, loudly, that if the state could go back in time and make him serve from the start of his lifeânot just from the crime, but maybe even from his childhood or birth if that's what it takes, they would. That's what he owes: not just the years from here on out, but all of his life. All of it.
Big, dramatic feelings beg for big expressions. That's why declarations of love are often for “forever.” Some things are too enormous to fit into just right now; we need to borrow from the past and future to have enough room to hold them.