Authors: Emily Winslow
Evan apologizes for how the legal system is slanted toward the defendant, and for the “revictimization” that the trial process can cause. I don't feel revictimized, though. This is an entirely new sense of helplessness, not a familiar one. The crime against me wasn't committed by a heaving bureaucracy.
It takes three phone calls with Gavin over the course of the day, one he makes from Heathrow, one from layover in Chicago, and one I make to his U.S. cell phone at my midnight, for me to finally tell him that the postponement is happening. I hadn't wanted to mention it earlier, in passing and while the kids were around. Then, just after I say it, his phone runs out of charge and we're cut off.
Morning now. I haven't told John yet, even though I said I would. I feel frozen. I don't want to say “June third is canceled” until I can also say “The new date is . . .” Evan will try to tell me that today.
He does, at the end of it: October 21, five months away.
Summer is difficult.
It always is. In America, it's the heat and humidity that's painful. In England, it's the light.
We're far enough north that sunset and sunrise times swing wildly with the change of seasons. The summer's late sunsets keep me up too long and the dawns wake me too early, giving me migraines. Most of all, the lack of waking darkness makes me feel too exposed. The bright times reveal the world to be overwhelmingly large. I prefer winter, when daylight starts to fade in late afternoon, and the night lingers past breakfast. Then there are hours to live in little pools of artificial light, into which I invite only a special few. It's much more manageable. Winter is comforting.
But this is summer.
Switzerland distracts. The choirboys are joyfully, relentlessly physical, always kicking a ball around and jostling each other. They flirt with the teenage girls from the Czech choir, and dance “Hava Nagila” with the Israeli choir. They play improvised Pictionary on a chalkboard, making rebuses for words like “Higgs boson” and “Boudicca.” They sing sweetly.
I take dozens of pictures and e-mail anecdotes home to all of the parents each day. Then, after return, I organize a Flickr site for all of the photos, mine first and then adding in others'. The images are inevitably similar: the boys in grass-stained black trousers and untucked white dress shirts playing soccer in the park between performances; the boys lounging in half-buttoned red cassocks, polishing their shoes and hunching over smartphones in various dressing rooms. It's only when I get the photos from one of our Swiss guides that I see something different. She's included pictures of the nonperformers, too: of me and the other chaperones, of herself and the other guides. These pictures make me feel suddenly present, suddenly existent. I was there, too. I'd been so focused on looking after the kids that I hadn't really thought about it as my trip, only theirs.
One of the youngest boys had asked me why my festival ID was white, like the children's, instead of black, like the Director's. I'd half joked to him that it's because I'm terribly, terribly unimportant. (Though I understand my intrinsic human value, it was only half a joke because we chaperones were musically irrelevant on a musical trip.) He'd responded earnestly, with big eyes, that I am important.
Very, very
important, he'd insisted, convincingly.
Afterward, I feel refreshed. Home feels new. The trip has cheered me to the point that I'm no longer angry with Fryar's defense attorney, but now fascinated. What madcap delay tactic will she try next? I imagine facing her from the stand and feel curiosity instead of fear.
I outline my new novel, the one that will have a lying character in it. I've already started it, fifty draft pages written last summer, just weeks before Fryar was arrested. If I'd realized that all of this was going to happen this year, I wouldn't have made the central crime a decades-old sex murder. The killer smothered my book-victim so hard that he broke her nose.
I'm permitted to buy a ticket to a sold-out May Ball, for research purposes. (The college May Balls take place in June, after exams, instead of in May, before exams, when they used to happen and for which they were named.) I've already written a scene in which a character chooses a dress for her college's ball, so I've got to go ahead and have the ball itself happen on paper. I've never been to one, so I need to see for myself.
I'm too old for this sort of thing, which I assume, despite the inclusion of graduate students and faculty, will be mostly tipsy undergraduates posing and flirting, so I plan to observe more than participate. From the preparations and mornings-after that I've seen in previous years, these parties are on a grand scale, each having the whole of their walled college grounds to make use of. It's the elaborate, creative details that I'm interested in. At this college, this year's theme is “Lost in the Woods.”
A friend generously agrees to babysit for the night so that I'll be able to decide on the fly how late I'd like to come home. The balls go straight through till morning.
I organize a middle-aged version of dressing up: heels and dark trousers, bright top and sparkly earrings, and a velvet cape for when it gets cold after sunset. I got to wear plenty of fussy princess dresses and elegant gowns years ago (theater, high school choir solos, and a formal wedding in my twenties to thank for that), so I don't mind too much that I'm past wearing the summery, pretty things that the
young women will have on. It's all right getting older so long as one has lived one's own youth thoroughly.
In the end, it turns out to be a chilly evening, so a lot of the gracefully bared shoulders are covered by incongruous cardigans and borrowed tuxedo jackets. The women sparkle nonetheless, as do colored lights, fireworks, and a spinning Ferris wheel. The men are all identical in black tie. Gavin is in California for the week; I miss him.
While I'm there, an e-mail from my publisher comes through, accepting the latest version of the finished novel that I've been salvaging so very slowly, all year. The feeling is relief, never triumph. First accomplishments are a thrill; subsequent ones just feel like catching up with fading promise.
I listen to passing snippets of conversation. Exams are over, adventures ahead. There's laughing, kissing, posturing. It's genuinely sweet. I remember being in college. I remember wanting all of the things that I have now.
Without prompting, in a friendly e-mail, a pastor from our Sunday church finally offers to talk. This is more than eight months after I told him about Fryar's out-of-the-blue arrest. He's a little late. We're already visiting other churches.
I'm not happy with the sermon at the first new one we've visited. There was nothing “red flag” in it, nothing political or offensive or overly controlling; I just hate the simplistic, self-helpy systems that are encouraged in evangelical culture. This one was about supposedly “sinful” responses to stressors, and next week is going to be about making better choices. What I found troubling was the focus on feelings not just actions, as if emotions are themselves choices. I've been feeling just about everything on their sin list, and I don't think I've done a thing wrong. Feelings are fascinating to me. I put them in the same category as physical and cultural settings,
something you find yourself inside of and that you should explore, acknowledge, and understand. Actual decisions come after that. Sins have to be committed, don't they? Something that washes over you isn't the same. It's what you do that matters.
I reply to the pastor from our old church, the one who only now offered to talk. Yes, I want to meet, but one of the things we'll need to talk about is how long it took to get to this point. It took me a few days to decide to bother to answer at all, but now I'm glad that I did. Having said my part, I'm actually interested in the conversation that might come after.
I think that some people use the stereotype of victims not wanting to talk as a free pass for their own desire to flee the topic, as if their silence were for my sake. People said that they didn't want to “pressure” me to talk by bringing it up; they didn't mind at all, though, pressuring me to keep quiet, by their silence. There's no true “doing nothing” here. Ignoring the situation is as much an act as saying or doing something.
Back when I was having flashbacks in college, I remember that I was terrible at asking for anything. All I could easily do was agree, say “yes” or “it's fine,” even if things weren't fine. I didn't have the strength to correct or even mildly argue or formulate specific requests; I could only accept from what was made explicitly available. My classmates were expert at this. They offered and offered and offered a full menu: company or solitude, distraction or dealing with it, food or a walk or going out or going home. There was always something good to nod at, something I actually needed. Each bad day, they would ask again, and I could nod at something different then if I wanted to.
A breezy “Let me know if you need anything!” would not have been enough. At my most desperate, I couldn't respond to that. Specific offers and invitations were necessary, especially making explicit a willingness to talk.
While my friends at the time were superb, my church back then was similar in response to my church now: total panic over it being a sex crime. The leaders couldn't cope. I was not spoken to. My Pittsburgh pastors literally didn't make eye contact with me for weeks.
There was no accusation in their avoidance, no blame. It was just ordinary discomfort and embarrassment. Deflecting those was apparently far more important to them than I was.
Cambridge is a very small city. All of the priests, pastors, and chaplains know, or at least know of, one another. I shouldn't pit two against each another, but I can't help but compare. My church's bare “I'll pray for you” with no other action to support it was bullshit, just bullshit. John listens to everything; John doesn't fling up a wall of God and Scripture to protect his worldview and sensitivities from my complications; John understands that talking about a sex crime isn't the same as talking about sex, so there's nothing to be flustered or coy or worried about. I asked him for help with this difficult year, and he took it on. That's how you be a goddamn priest.
Six days with no reply from my old Sunday pastor. I had been glad in the first few days that he was taking his time responding to me, and understood that weekends are the busiest days for clergy and that they often take Monday off, but by Thursday I give up hope and write again: “I find it really heartbreaking that you've decided to not respond at all. I don't know what to make of the silence.”
He does respond to that, with a flutter of explanations over any real apology. Also with a reiterated offer to talk, but only with my husband present. I'm horrified at what that implies, about either what he thinks of my intentions for the meeting or what he thinks of rape, as if I'm asking him for sex talk. He blusters in response to my concern that such hadn't crossed his mind, but he won't
back down on requiring a chaperone for me; actually, he says, for any woman in the congregation who wants to talk with him for any reason. It's insulting, infantilizing, and creepily sexualizing to demand that. I'd not experienced anything like it under the previous vicar.
Later, the senior pastor, this pastor's boss, will meet with the first pastor and meâpointedly unchaperonedâto insist that no such policy exists, that I must have misunderstood, and that I had been at fault for their inaction because I only ever talked about the situation in person in the busyness after services instead of phoning or e-mailing during office hours. They'll “good cop, bad cop” me, with the pastor I'd tried to talk to seemingly sincerely apologizing, and the senior pastor undercutting that sincerity by interjecting, over and over, explanations why the apologizing pastor actually hadn't done anything wrong.
Back in the present, I write this pastor back, insisting that I won't be chaperoned, then I vent to John. We were part of that church for years, and it hurts that they don't appear to care. I don't want to be advised or comforted by them at this point; I just want to leave with some understanding between us, and an acknowledgment that things could have been done better. They deny me even that.
I tell John, “Honestly, I'm not trying to burn bridges, but, then again, I don't think I'm the one tossing the match.”
Ten days later, John is dead.
His car crashed. Bystanders helped his passengers out, but he was unconscious and the car on fire. They couldn't rescue him.
My first thought, once I comprehend the news, is anger that he never had the chance to marry and have children. He wanted that. He was sweet, hopeful. He was only thirty-five. He should have had years ahead for that.
But perhaps it's that lack of a family as a focal point for con
dolences (he had no siblings, and his parents live hours away in Devon) that allows for the mourning to be so widely shared. John was part of an enormous “us,” really several linked but distinct usses: the chapel, the choir, the college fellows, his students, the Faculty of Divinity, the city churches. Grief is everywhere. The college flag flies at half-mast. He's the top headline of the city newspaper.
Walking toward the college gate, I see what appear to be lights on, in his rooms across the courtyard. I'm indignant. How dare someone move around in there, touch things, inhabit his space? I speed up my footsteps.
Once through, I can see that actually it's the rooms next to his that are lit. His are dark. That hurts, too. Everything hurts.
The feelings are awful, and the worst is that these are the very feelings I would have brought to John. I don't know what to do with them now. I'm selfish, angry, and lonely, even with all of these good friends who are sad, too. I'm lonely for this one good friend. Everyone else is not enough.
I try to make a list of everything he did for me. There's so much that I don't know if I can even remember it all:
He listened to everything, without ever complaining that it was too much, so that there would always be one person I could turn to who knew all of it.
He offered to tell people for me, anyone I couldn't bear to tell myself. He offered to accompany me anywhere short of America, so that I wouldn't have to do difficult things alone. He came to our house to be with Gavin while I testified far away.
He protected me from being pushed into any glib kind of grand forgiveness. He accepted, as if they were admirable, whatever small forgivenesses I could genuinely manage.
He made me laugh. When I worried about having to pray for my
enemies, he cheerfully offered that I might enjoy the Psalms, which have quite a few vivid verses about revenge and judgment.
He prayed for Fryar for me, even though he hated him, too. He did it for me, because I couldn't and felt that I should and asked him to.