and careers. She asked her all sorts of questions about her activities and her friends and what she might want to do over the summer. My father was also helpful. He kept Lucas busy, took him skating one day, built a Lego in the basement. Guy stuff. But I was looking at it from the outside, you know. I couldn’t be in it with them. It was too normal, too … calm. Inside, I was going wild. Kicking and screaming against the fate that the universe had handed my family. I would not accept it. I had failed to protect my daughter, and I would not fail at this. And yet I knew with every passing second that the chances of finding this creature were vanishing. I wanted to be a man. I wanted to feel like a man again. And I walked around silently and with a blank expression, looking like a strong man. But inside, I was a child having a tantrum. And part of me desperately needed my parents to see it.
It was during this week that Charlotte starting having her dream. She knew the origins—some wildlife documentary they’d watched a few weeks back about wolves. In one of the scenes, a lone wolf chased a lone impala through the woods to the edge of a cliff. The impala, being deft and sure-footed, slowly made its way onto the steep rocky side of the cliff, while the wolf frantically ran along the edge, looking down at his meal, so close but unattainable. He didn’t give up for nearly an hour.
In the dream, Charlotte watched this scene from a distance. Though she knew the ending, each time, she relived it as though the impala might just get caught in the woods before making it to safety, or perhaps this time the wolf would venture off the side of the cliff onto the rocks and find his own footing. As it played out, always with the same ending, her heart would pound wildly and she would awaken to find herself tangled up in sweaty sheets and fear.
The dream was haunting in so many ways. The hunter and the hunted. Tom and the rapist. Injustice and Tom. The rapist and Jenny. Tom’s family and Charlotte’s secrets.
I asked her which character she was in the dream, the wolf who loses his meal, or the impala who cleverly escapes but will always be in danger on level ground.
I don’t know. It wasn’t clear in the dream. I mean, I always saw it from the distance, watching both animals. One running for its life. The other out to kill. So I can’t say from any feeling or perspective I had. But, I did think about it. It tortured me nearly every night when the Kramers were here that Christmas, and it continued on and off for weeks after they left. I suppose I could be the wolf, endangering my family and the entire life I’ve built. But then I think I’m actually the impala, running for my life. I do feel like that. Like I’m always one step away from being found out. It sounds paranoid, I’m sure, but I think Tom’s mother knew. I could see it in her eyes. And I hated her for it. I know she was helping Jenny. I should have wanted her to stay longer. But all I could think, all through Christmas Eve dinner and caroling and opening presents the next day and church and another dinner, was that I wanted her to get the hell out of my house.
Charlotte had her secrets, but I believed there was more to her dislike of Tom’s parents, his mother especially. I mentioned her childhood earlier. I suppose this is a good time to elucidate, and I ask for your indulgence.
Charlotte grew up in New London. For those of you not familiar with this part of the country, New London is home to the United States Coast Guard Academy and a naval sub base. The military is strongly present. Her mother, Ruthanne, was a promiscuous young woman who became a single mother at age twenty-three. She had not attended college and worked at a small factory, making decorative candles. Charlotte can remember vividly the smell of scented wax that would follow Ruthanne through the front door of their apartment after work. Ruthanne’s family lived in town. Her parents, after doing some readjustments to the dreams they’d had for their youngest daughter, were helpful at first. But they were not healthy folks—drinkers, smokers, verging on obesity. They were both dead before Charlotte was ten years old. Two years later, Ruthanne finally married. His name was Greg.
This is Charlotte’s first secret, and it was well kept. She did not reveal it to me until I had earned her trust. And that was not an easy task.
I was a beautiful girl. I had blond hair and blue eyes and my body was quite developed around that time. And my face, if you look at pictures, you can definitely see that Jenny is my daughter. My mother became the manager of the candle factory. They ran it twenty-four–seven, rotating the workers on day and night shifts. I guess they had enough customers that they needed to make all those candles. I’m sure it had something to do with the “illegals” they hired as well—maybe they knew there wouldn’t be inspections at night. My mother used to talk about the two payrolls, the one on the books and the one that was cash. Greg worked on and off as a carpenter. He used to tell my mother to keep track of the cash, don’t trust anyone. Especially the “illegals.” He had several tattoos. One of them was on his neck. It was a snake and then some words under it. “Don’t tread on me,” they said. He wasn’t a fan of the government. “The man” he used to call it. Anything that had any authority was “the man,” like some kind of hippie. He was an idiot.
The first night it happened, my mother was at work. I was seventeen. We lived in this little shithole apartment with one bedroom and thin walls. The kitchen was nothing more than an electric burner and microwave. We didn’t even have a proper oven. There was one bathroom with a tiny shower that ran out of hot water every morning because the neighbors were also “illegals”—they must have had six or seven people crammed into that place. Greg disliked “illegals” almost as much as the government. He used to walk around, talking to himself. He and my mother shared the bedroom and I slept on the sofa, so I had nowhere to go when he came out of there. I heard a lot of crazy shit coming from him.
Anyway, I would be lying if I said I didn’t see it coming. Women just know. Maybe men do, too, but I’m not convinced of it. We can tell when there’s a shift, when a man has decided he wants to fuck us. I’ve felt it with guy friends in college. I’ve felt it in crowded bars. I’ve felt it with colleagues at work. And I felt it with Greg. I did my best to ignore him, stay out of his way. I started wearing more clothing, pants instead of skirts, flat shoes, turtlenecks. It didn’t matter. It never does, does it? Like I said, once a man has decided he wants to fuck you, there’s no getting him off that position. So the night it happened, I had come home from work. I was a waitress at a diner a couple of nights a week. I remember being really upset about a customer. I truly can remember every minute of that night—how this customer yelled at me for bringing him pie with ice cream on it when he’d said no ice cream. He was right and I said I was sorry, but he asked to see my manager, kept yelling, wanting his meal for free. I started to cry. I thought I was going to be fired. My boss told me to go home. God, it sounds so stupid now. It turned out the guy did this every time to try to get a free meal.
“That would be upsetting to any seventeen-year-old,” I told her.
I suppose. The point is, I came home crying. Greg was there. We sat on the couch and he listened to me talk for a long time. He got us each a beer. He told me everything would be okay. And I actually felt comforted by him. I let my guard down.
The rest of the story requires some graphic detail, but I believe it is important. I apologize if it is hard to read.
Greg smiled at her and stroked her hair. I imagine he had convinced himself that she wanted him as well, even behind the turtlenecks and the long pants. People believe what they want to believe. Her heart started to pound wildly, but she didn’t move. He stroked her face. He moaned. It sounded like the word “ahhhh.” He studied her eyes like a lover. He reached under her shirt and touched her breast. He moaned again and she felt his hot breath on her face as he leaned in to kiss her.
Charlotte remembers feeling frozen. He had comforted her and she wanted more. Not like this. Not with her body. But that was all that was on the table, so she remained still, frozen between her need to be comforted, to be loved, and her repulsion. She said he looked
