Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 19: Then

"I'm right here with you," Owen said.

"I don't know if I can do this," I whispered back.

He gave me as much of a side hug as he could manage in the doorway of our local police station's conference room. The weight of his arm across my shoulders reassured me that yes, of course I could do this.

This was the right thing to do.

I took a step across the threshold into the small, bare room. The only furniture they'd bothered to set up was one long, metal table and a handful of never-been-cleaned folding chairs. Rust-colored upholstery frayed around the edges of the seats where countless fingers had nervously peeled and picked at it.

I inhaled the stagnant air and tried to focus on the feeling of my lungs expanding outward, against the fabric of my sweater.

"Have a seat." An officer entered the room behind us, carrying a lined notepad and pen. OFFICER BOSE, according to his name plate, was a short, sturdy man who looked about our age but with much less hair than Owen. He had combed the remaining tuft sideways, in an attempt to disguise his baldness. I imagined him examining his scalp that morning while getting ready for work, smoothing drugstore pomade between his palms and then across the sparse, struggling hairs. A ritual he probably performed every morning.

Officer Bose strode to the folding chair on the far side of the table and waited behind it without sitting. He watched me carefully.

I didn't like the expression on his face but I couldn't put my finger on why it bothered me. What was that emotion I detected, causing his lip to curl upward at the corner like that? Could he already be irritated with me? I hadn't even said anything yet.

Owen moved to take a seat, motioning for me to follow.

I willed my body to sit down beside him in the remaining folding chair. Its metal legs whined and snapped into place below me.

Officer Bose tossed his notepad onto the table with a loud thwack without taking his eyes off me. Finally, he lowered himself into the chair across from us and folded his thick, red hands on top of the yellow lined paper.

Here we were. This was it. It was time to report as much as I knew about the rape.

The idea that I was about to try to "report" a crime I couldn't even remember seemed crazy, but now at least we had a little more information to work with than we'd had the night before, when we'd huddled together on the davenport and made the decision to come in here.

On the piece of paper crumpled in my front pocket, in my own careful handwriting, was a list of names. Earlier that day at the Dolans' house, I'd written them down verbatim from Marcus. Then I'd folded the piece of paper in half, in half again, and finally into a tiny rectangle that could be crammed into the front pocket of my jeans.

Other than that list of names, the ten or fifteen minutes we'd spent with Marcus had been disappointing. Liza was traveling in New York for the weekend, apparently, and Marcus hadn't been able to provide many details surrounding the rape beyond what he'd explained to me while I was half- naked and terrified in his bathtub, six weeks earlier.

I hadn't known what to expect when he started rehashing what he could remember about the night my brain had forced me to forget. I guess I'd been expecting to feel nauseated all over again. Or maybe, I thought, I would cry. Finally. But as Marcus had answered Owen's follow-up questions and promised to call his employees who'd been at the Christmas party to "look into the incident," I hadn't felt nausea or terror and I certainly hadn't started crying.

Instead, I'd experienced no connection to Marcus's words at all. I knew, of course, that it was my body he described finding in a freezing, bloody pile on his back lawn. It was me whom he'd brought inside to "clean up," as he put it. But he could have been talking about something he'd read in the news, or the storyline of a TV show he'd been binge-watching the week before.