Denial (2 page)

I
know that I was raped. But here is the odd thing. If my sister had not been not raped, too, if she didn't remember—if I didn't have this police report right in front of me on my desk—I might doubt that the rape occurred. The memory feels a bit like a dream. It has hazy edges. Are there aspects of what I think I recall that I might have made up?

In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the police. Lt. Paul Macone, deputy chief of the police department in Concord, Massachusetts, called to tell me he wanted to reopen our rape case. “I need to know if you have any objection. And I will need your help,” he said. The rape occurred in 1973.

Lt. Macone and I grew up in the same town, Concord, Massachusetts, considered by many to be the birthplace of our nation. It is the site of the “shot heard round the world,” Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase for the first shot in the first battle of the American
Revolution, which took place on the Old North Bridge on April 19, 1775. The town is frequently flooded with tourists, who come to see the pretty, historic village and the homes of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived and worked there. It is still a small town, with small-town crimes. The
Concord Journal
still reports accidents involving sheep and cows.

Although we didn't know each other, Lt. Macone and I overlapped in high school. We never met back then; he was a “motor head,” as he puts it, obsessed with cars, and I ran with an artier crowd. But I knew the name—everyone in town did—because of Macone's Sporting Goods. Everyone bought sports equipment there. It was a fixture in our town. It's where I bought my bike, the bike I was riding home from ballet class on the day I was raped.

I had recently requested the complete file. I wanted to understand what happened to me on the day that my sister and I were raped. I had an idea that by reading the file, by seeing the crime reports in black and white on a page, I could restore a kind of order in my mind. If I could just connect fact with feeling, the fuzziness in my head would be reduced, or so I hoped.

The file had to be redacted. Lt. Macone had to read the entire file in order to black out the names of suspects and other victims.

He told me, “I read that file from cover to cover. And I realized that the rapist might still be out there. There were other rapes. The same gun, the same MO—what if the rapist were still on the street? Other children could be at risk. I was worried about what might happen if the rapist were still at large.”

Lt. Macone brought the case to his boss, the chief of police. “I've been a cop so long, we can't help trying to solve crimes. Twenty-nine years on the force. And I thought this crime was highly solvable. You'd have to be brain-dead not to see that.
There was the unusual MO. The fact that you and your sister both saw the perp's face before he put on his mask. There was a description of the gun, of the perp's clothing. The fact that he spent so much time in your house, early in the evening, when all the neighbors were home. To say that it piqued my curiosity is an understatement.

“It was clear to us what had to be done,” Lt. Macone said. “We had to try to solve the crime. But we knew we would need your help. I needed to ask questions that could be quite personal. I didn't know if it could put you over the edge…. I didn't want to be a party to revictimizing someone. You seemed like you wanted to know…you seemed sincere…. But I needed your help to go forward. Not every rape victim wants to revisit the crime,” he said.

But I was willing.

In the police station in Concord, files are kept in a locked room on the second floor. To get there, someone has to release the lock on the elevator, and someone has to let you into the locked room. Every time I'm near that room, I feel cold. There is a single file cabinet containing sexual assaults. One of those old-fashioned gunmetal gray cabinets. I hate those. The same kind my physician grandfather kept his X-rays in. The Concord PD keeps the records of certain crimes for a specified number of years, and the records of other crimes forever. The “forever” crimes include violent sexual assaults.

In the forever-crimes file cabinet, a couple inches back, was another fat file, another cold case. There had been a rape, two years before ours, right around the corner from where our rape occurred. “I was astounded,” Lt. Macone told me. “There were two victims, just like your case. The same kind of gun. The perp sounded remarkably similar. Unless I was missing something, this was clearly the same guy.

“We get a lot of record requests,” he said. “But this one was
very unusual,” he said. “This was the most serious crime I've seen in my twenty-nine years on the force.”

“What was so unusual about the crime?” I asked. I had always heard that rape was a relatively common occurrence, so I was surprised.

“Everything,” he said. “There are very few stranger rapes in Concord. We get indecent A and B's [assault and batteries], but very few crimes involving firearms. And very few cases involving home invasions, especially with kids involved. Every horrible factor you could have was there,” he said.

It was almost impossible for him to imagine, he said, that a crime like this could occur in his hometown. It is almost impossible for me to imagine that Lt. Macone and I grew up together. Lt. Macone grew up in a safe town, a town where the few crimes that occurred would certainly be solved. I didn't.

Lt. Macone saw that the detectives who worked on the case in 1973 did not take the crime seriously, in part because they did not believe my sister and me. They had trouble believing that the rapist was a stranger to us. Rapes like the one we described simply did not occur in our town, or so they believed. Denial and disbelief were the easier course. The detectives left notes such as the following: “I told Mr. Stern that I feel the girls were holding something back from us,” and “I was sure that this person may have been there longer in the house [than the girls reported to us].” On the back of one of the statements taken from me several days after the rape, I found a detective's handwritten note recording my reaction. “She says she sees she has a ‘skill'—becoming very stern and hard.” This was a clue, I would later discover, that I had already been traumatized. But how?

In notes from February 13, 1974, four months after the crime, I see: “Personal visit. Spoke to Mr. Stern. He states nothing new to add. He feels that both girls seem to have forgotten it.” The
police took my father's statement as permission to cease investigating the crime, and the rapist was not found.

 

I see in the files given to me by the Concord police a laboratory report from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A doctor examined us, I remember, in the hospital. It was dark by the time we got there, and the hospital was empty. I remember bright lights shining on my body and in my eyes, like a crime scene in a dream. In the dream, someone had accidentally transferred my soul to someone else's body for the evening. My sister Sara was in the hospital, too. But she must have been down the hall because I couldn't hear her voice. I felt alone. It was a time of night when we should have been in bed at our father's house, the beds my father had made for us. I wanted to say, “There has been an error here. This is me, Jessica. I am not a grown-up! I should not be alone here. I am not a criminal!” But I was stuck in the dream. I couldn't escape. I heard that buzzing sound of fluorescent lights. The sensation of cold when the speculum pierced, once again, the flesh that felt torn.

Would I ever heal? No, I would not. I would become someone else.

The laboratory reports indicate that sperm were detected in my underpants, my leotard, and my jeans. I do not recall whether they found sperm on my body, but they must have. How much of what I think I recall is correct? How much of it is a result of memory distorted by the Valium and sleeping pills the doctors administered to us afterward, or the chemicals my body produced, the chemicals that even now are distorting my features as I read the file, making me hard and tough?

How much of what we think of as an admirable response to trauma—the “stiff upper lip”—is actually disassociation, the mind's attempt to protect us from experiences that are too pain
ful to digest? I can recall the facts, at least some of them. But I don't feel very much. At least, the feelings I have are not kind. They are not sympathetic toward my fifteen-year-old self. It happened. It happens to a lot of women. I survived. Most women do. I am “strong,” but in those moments of strength, I don't feel.

I will admit that I am very afraid of one thing. Not just afraid. Ashamed. I am afraid that I am incapable of love.

 

This is not the first time I have read my police file. In 1994, when one of my neighbors thought she might have been sexually abused, it occurred to me that our rapist might have raped her, too. I asked the police for my then-twenty-year-old file, and they sent me part of it, including a barely audible audiotape. Even now, I haven't found the courage to listen to it. There was nothing in the file to help my neighbor, and nothing in the file that helped me, at least not then.

The first time I saw the file, it was incomplete. But now I have the whole thing. Everything is here—the things we had to tell the police, the things the police wrote down that they thought about us at the time. Only the names of suspects are blacked out.

I have trouble reading it. The copy is bad, but that is really just an excuse. I have trouble focusing my mind, as if my brain were underwater. I have an urge to put it away. I force myself to read. Moments later I want to stop again. Again, I force myself to read.

A wave of loneliness washes over me as I read. I felt so alone as a child. Our mother had died when I was three years old and my sister was two. We lived with our grandparents while my mother was dying, and stayed with them, after that, for a year. We moved out when my father remarried, a little over a year after our mother's death. He married Lisa, the older sister of my best friend in nursery school. The marriage had been more or
less arranged by my best friend's mother and my grandmother. It was as if our father had married Mary Poppins. Lisa was young and bright and impossibly beautiful. I can still recall the comfort of resting my cheek against the smooth brown skin of her forearm. But it was not a good marriage. It lasted only six years. When I was twelve, our father married for the third time.

Our father was in Norway with his new wife at the time we were raped. I remember this distinctly. That is why a babysitter was staying with us. She was supposed to be ferrying us around. The evening of the rape we had gone to Lisa's house, as we did, once a week, after ballet. But Lisa went out to dinner that night, taking our half sisters with her. My sister and I stayed behind. We had homework. We asked the babysitter to pick us up. She was busy, she told us. I remember this. And I remember what I see here in the notes taken down by the police at the time: the babysitter didn't believe us when we called again a couple hours later, immediately after the rape, telling her that now she really needed to come get us. It was too hard to believe, in 1973, that girls could be raped in Concord, Massachusetts.

Our father was visiting the Trondheim Institute of Technology. I know because he told me this. And I remember. He was establishing what he considered to be a very important relationship for his laboratory. They would cooperate on radar technologies. But here is something I learn upon reading the file for the first time, something that, amazingly, I did not recall. When our family physician called our father to tell him his two girls had been raped at gunpoint, he did not curtail his trip. He did not come home to us right away. How is it that I keep forgetting this fact?

 

My father is a remarkable man. He is immensely strong. You can see his strength in the line of his jaw, his erect posture. If
you met him, you would probably come to love and admire him. Nearly everyone does. You would sense an old-fashioned kind of integrity in him, an integrity based, in part, on the power of will.

I am proud of my father. He is like a precious jewel that has been handed down in my family. But he has sharp edges. Sharp edges, yes—but there is another side of him. He is wonderful with children. He lets them push themselves. He knows my son is agile and strong, so he let him climb on the roof of his garage from the time he was six years old. He would not let other, less strong children do that, my father tells me, and I believe him. I will admit that I feel slightly frightened when I see my son climbing on this roof, but I still my fear. I do not want to over-protect my son.

I suppose my father must have felt me to be tough, like my son. I know my father loves me very much, but sometimes the jewel-hard side is the one he displays, perhaps to protect the more tender side. I believe that my father is unbearably tender inside, but my belief is based more on faith than evidence.

My father invented many things, mostly related to surface-wave devices. He invented a flat-panel display. He and two other physicists invented X-ray lithography, a technology that makes it possible to lay X-ray-absorbing metals, such as gold or tungsten, onto a chip made of diamond or silicon. X-rays are what killed my mother. If only X-ray-absorbing metals had been placed on my mother's body when my grandfather irradiated her. But in those days the dangers of X-rays weren't fully understood, and my mother died.

 

There are items in the file that I find impossible to believe. For example, I told the police that someone—perhaps the rapist—called me at my father's house a few days after the rape, calling
himself “Kevin Armadillo,” identifying himself as “the one who fucked you last night.” How could the rapist know to find me at my father's house? He did not rape us there, but at our first stepmother's home. How would he have known that we lived with our father, and were only visiting our first stepmother? I am mortified. I don't recall any such thing. Was I in a state of hysteria, making things up in order to get attention?