Page 81 of The Way I Am Now
“Yes.”
“Did he know he was hurting you?”
“Your Honor.” He raises his hand and stands up now. “Again, speculation.”
“I’ll rephrase. Could you indicate to him in some way that he was hurting you?”
“I was crying. I mean, I couldn’t speak or yell because he was still choking me, and I couldn’t move because he was holding me down, but I was crying, and I didn’t know until later, but I was bleeding. He knew he was hurting me—he wanted to hurt me.”
White Hair raises his hand again, almost bored now, not even bothering to look up from his folder. “Move to strike everything after the first sentence, ‘I was crying.’ She’d already answered the question.”
I see Mara’s face turning red.
I want to look at the man so badly, want to make him look at me as he deletes my words from the record. But I keep my eyes on Mara, let her be angry for us both. I know for sure I’ve made the right decision now. I couldn’t have had Josh here listening to this. And I couldn’t do it alone, either.
“Do you know how long he was raping you?”
“Five minutes.”
“How do you know?”
“I looked at the clock when I could move again. I remember thinking it felt like hours. I thought the clock had to be wrong.”
“And what happened next?” she asks. I think hard, trying to put the events in the right order, but my brain keeps skipping ahead to the end. “What’s the next thing you remember?” she rephrases, somehow reading my mind.
“He let go of my throat and he ripped the nightgown out of my mouth and I started coughing and he kept telling me to shut up. He was moving my hair out of my eyes—it was stuck to my face because my face was wet from crying. He wanted me to look at him.”
Hand raise.
“Hesaid, ‘Look at me,’” I correct myself. I was catching on now—emotions are not allowed here, feelings aren’t facts. “He told me to listen, and he held my face so that I had to look into his eyes.”
“He told you to listen—what did he say?”
“He said, ‘No one will ever believe you.’”
“Then what? Did he leave?”
“No. He sat up but was still kneeling between my legs, staring at me—at my body. I tried to cover myself, but he moved my hands away. He made me promise that I wasn’t going to tell anyone.”
“And did you promise?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He said that if I told anyone, he would kill me. He said, ‘I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you,’ and given what had just happened, I believed him.”
“So did he leave then?”
“No.” I hear my voice shaking, I feel my throat caving in, just like it had that night.
“What happened next?”
I can’t even look at Mara—I’d left this part out at the wooden playground. I cough, try to clear my throat. “He, um . . . he kissed me. And then he got up, put his underwear back on, and told me to go back to sleep.”
“And then he left?”
“Yes.”
