Page 104 of The Way I Used to Be
I slowly uncover my eyes. I expect him to be looking at me. But he’s not; his hands are covering his ears, his eyes shut tight. He’s slumped forward, toward me, his body folded in on itself. He doesn’t move; I don’t even hear him breathe. I don’t know what to say next so I say nothing. I leave him be. Let him process. Hope that he believes me, that he picks my side. I wait.
“I...,” he begins, but stops. I look up at him. “I—I just don’t understand what you’re saying, Edy,” he mumbles into his hands. Then he pulls himself up and looks at me. “I don’t un-der-stand how this happened.” He says each word, each syllable, separately—precisely, carefully. He studies my face, searching, but I don’t understand either.
Then he’s on his feet fast. And he’s pacing, like he’s thinking too many things all at once. “No,” I hear him mutter as he walks out of sight around the corner and into his bedroom. I almost call after him, but just as I open my mouth I hear what sounds like a dump truck driving into the side of the house, and Caelin screaming “FUCK” over and over, in this guttural, animal way.
My feet can’t resist taking me to his door. I look at what he’s done, what he’s doing. Everything that was sitting on top of his dresser—all the relics of his high school glory: basketball trophies, medals, certificates, photos, and these model cars that he and Kevin spent eternities working on together—is now just a broken, mangled pile of memory vomit on the floor. And he’s kicking his closet door over and over, with his bare feet.
He always keeps such a tight lid on everything. I mean, I’ve seen him mad, of course, I’ve seen him nasty at times, but never like this. He spins around, now at his dresser again and his hands grip the edges so tight. I put my hand over my mouth to keep from yelling at him to stop, because I know what he’s about to do—he’s about to throw the dresser on the floor. This dresser has to weigh more than both of us combined; it’s old, antique-old, it belonged to our great-grandparents. It’s probably worth something too. I have a vision of it breaking through the floor and crashing into the basement. But I just stand there, bracing myself, and I watch as it teeters forward, the floorboards creaking under its shifting weight.
And then it all stops. The dresser rests again on four feet, and he’s stopped yelling. He just stands there, breathing heavy, square in front of me, and he looks at me like he sees me, like maybe he finally gets it. He pinches the bridge of his nose as his eyes fill with water, and then he shoves his knuckles into each eyeball, trying to thwart the tears. “I don’t understand,” he says again, except this time it’s not measured but messy and trembling. Because he does understand.
I watch as his body melts down to the floor and I start to understand something too. That this isn’t all about me. This thing, it touches everyone.
MY HANDS ARE SHAKINGas I hold her business card. As the phone rings, I just read her name over and over and over.
Caelin drives me downtown, to the precinct. I bite my nails until they bleed. Caelin keeps taking these enormous breaths that he doesn’t seem to be exhaling. But neither of us speaks until we’re walking up the massive, terrifying steps of the building.
“Caelin, you don’t have to come in with me,” I tell him, wanting to spare him. I don’t think I could bear for him to hear the details.
“No, I’m not leaving you here by yourself, Edy.”
We have to empty our pockets and walk through a metal detector; police officers in bulletproof vests wave those wands over our arms and legs. And then we follow the signs that lead us on a winding path to the fourth floor. I slowly push through the double doors and search the large room full of desks and computers and chairs and phones ringing and people rushing around with clipboards and serious looks on their faces, scanning for Detective Dorian Dodgson.
“Eden, I’m so glad you could make it down here so quickly,” she says, appearing next to us. “Caelin. Good to see you again. Shall we find a quieter place to talk?”
“Detective?” I start.
“Dorian, please,” she corrects.
“Okay, Dorian. Caelin doesn’t need to stay, does he?”
“Not at all.”
“Edy, I’ll stay,” Caelin insists.
“Sometimes,” Dorian tells him, picking up on my fear, “with this kind of discussion, the fewer people present, the better. You understand,” she says.
He nods, and I think he’s partly relieved, too. “I understand,” he says to her. “Call me when you’re done, Edy, and I’ll come pick you up. I’m gonna go to that bar right up the street, the one with the white-and-green awning, so I’m not far.”
He holds out a hand to shake with Dorian’s, and nods, very gentlemanly.
“Thank you for bringing her in, Caelin,” she tells him. “You take care now.”
She leads me to a room that has a window and a plant and a couch and a coffee table, not at all like those interrogation rooms you see on TV.
“It may be difficult to remember some things,” she cautions as she sets a Diet Coke down on the table in front of me, “but just try, as best you can, to describe exactly what happened.”
I wish it was difficult to remember.
“He came into my room. It was 2:48—I looked at the clock—by 2:53 it was over,” I tell her, but that’s not the complete truth.
Five minutes. Three hundred seconds, that’s all it is. It can seem like a short amount of time or a long amount of time, depending on what’s happening. You press the snooze button and wake up five minutes later—that’s no time at all. But if you’re giving a speech at the front of the classroom with all those eyes on you, or you’re getting a cavity filled, then five minutes can feel like a long time. Or say you’re being humiliated and tortured by someone you trusted, someone you grew up with, someone you loved, even... five minutes is forever. Five minutes is the rest of your entire fucking stupid life.
But there’s no way to really explain his mouth almost touching mine. No way to describe how completely alone I felt, like there was no one in the entire world who would be able to help me or stop him. Ever. No way to say how much I truly believed him when he said he would kill me. I take a breath and look Dorian in the eye, and try to find words to explain what words could never explain.
I tell her, as best I can, every gruesome detail.
She says things like, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm... in what way was he restraining your arms? Can you show me? And he penetrated you?” God, that word, “penetrate,” how could she say it? “How much force—would you say excessive? Was this before or after? Could you yell for help at that point? Can you describe, again, exactly how he inserted the nightgown into your mouth? Did you lose consciousness at any point? Did you, at any point, fear for your life? And he told you that he would kill you if you told anyone what happened?”
