perhaps in neighboring Cranston, or a step down toward retirement. Parsons is not a bad detective. But with his relative inexperience came an awkwardness when he recounted the more “intimate” details of the rape. His eagerness to appear disinterested and professional actually served to reveal just how interested he actually was. It was unsettling. But as I’ve said, the gravitation toward the prurient does not make us evil. We still do everything we can to try to conceal it. And so Detective Parsons did just that as he continued.
When we consulted the rape specialists from Cranston, they had all questioned the time frame. An hour is highly unusual for a rape in a public setting. It would have been difficult to see them in the woods that night. There was little moon and significant cloud cover. But she was within hearing range of anyone out on the street coming or going from the party, and certainly of anyone coming into the yard like the two individuals who did eventually hear her and come to her aid. But they could not argue with the medical facts. Then when they learned about the stick and the scratch, they said it made more sense. They think he stopped and started his various (there was an oddly long pause here) penetrations to whittle her. The carving was low on her back. It’s the place where girls like to get tattoos. They think he was marking her, or maybe just enjoying the cycles of relief and renewed fear from the starting and stopping, and then the winces from the pain of the sharp blade in her skin (another long pause, this time reflective). They think he may have gone through his own cycles of arousal, perhaps needing to refuel his excitement with the carving activity. This added a whole new direction to our thinking. This perpetrator was more sociopathic than we had originally assumed. And we were already thinking pretty far down that road.
Jenny’s physical recovery was not without its hardships. The areas that were sewn are not easily “shut down” and so there was regular pain, daily pain. Jenny tried to stop eating to reduce the amount of eliminating she would have to do. She lost over ten pounds in the two weeks her body was healing, and that time was spent mostly in bed or on the sofa loaded up with painkillers. There was some discord over the decision to send her back to school. There were only three weeks remaining when she was well enough, and the school, including all her teachers, had generously offered to provide her with materials and allow her to take her final exams over the summer.
I was curious to learn how the Kramers came out on this issue. Interestingly, it was Charlotte who wanted to keep Jenny home and under wraps, and Tom who wanted her to “get back on the horse.” I wondered if Charlotte’s real motivation had to do with the fact that Jenny did not look well at this point. In addition to the weight loss, she was pale, almost gray in color. She had dark circles under her eyes that can come from painkillers. And, overall, she had lost her “verve,” her bounce, her smile. I think Charlotte would have seen, had she been honest with herself, that she didn’t want anyone to see Jenny until the rape had been erased from her appearance the way it had been erased from her mind.
Charlotte won this fight as well.
The Kramers took a summer house on Block Island. It was a big sacrifice for Charlotte, who had to give up her spot on the pool committee at the club, but it had been her idea, a way of pressing the “reset” button. I imagine it was also a welcome break from one another. The fault lines in their relationship had now been stressed, and both of them feared the fracturing that seemed imminent. Tom came and went on weekends, then spent two weeks there in August. Lucas attended a local summer camp. He had been told about the attack (the word “rape” was not used), and he had not given it much thought beyond the impact it might have on his life. That is very normal for his age. Jenny finished her schoolwork and exams to complete tenth grade. She invited Violet to come for a week. They went to the beach and celebrated her sixteenth birthday. There were some smiles. Tom saw them as forced. Charlotte believed they were genuine, and as it had become her job to watch over Jenny carefully, journaling her moods, her eating habits, her disposition, her sleep, she felt very in tune with her daughter’s emotional recovery. In either case, the summer ended without incident. Of course, this was just the calm before the storm.
Jenny was told about the rape by the counselor and psychiatrist at the hospital before her release. There had been very little follow-up with any mental health professionals. No therapy, no counseling other than routine checks. It had been recommended, but both Charlotte and Tom were against it. For Charlotte, what was the point of talking about the rape when they’d gone to such trouble to forget it? For Tom, who had not been in favor of the treatment in the first place, therapy sounded like another way of avoiding what needed to be done—and that was to find the rapist.
When the professionals and the Kramers convened at the start of the school year, there was a consensus that the treatment had been enormously successful. Jenny did not remember the rape. She had returned to her normal eating and sleeping routines. Her parents were hopeful she would join the flurry of college preparation that dominates junior year—SATs, AP classes, volunteer work, and sports. She showed no signs of PTSD, no flashbacks, no nightmares, no fears of being alone, and no physical reactions when she was touched by others. Her case was deemed so successful that a military doctor from Norwich, who was conducting an ongoing study of the treatment for combat protocol, had asked for her records.
There was just one thing—and that was the carving.
How was school?
Charlotte Kramer asked Jenny the question one evening in the following winter, eight months after the rape. The question broke an uncomfortable silence that was, apparently, present at any dinner when it was just the three of them. On this Monday night like the others all season, Lucas was at hockey practice. He was showing himself to be a natural athlete, and his mother had enrolled him in the holy trinity for suburban Connecticut—football in the fall, hockey in the winter, and lacrosse in the spring. This left Charlotte, Tom, and Jenny alone to bear each other’s company, something that had not been easy since the rape. Without Lucas’s adolescent chatter about the state of the boys’ bathroom at school, which of his friends liked a girl, or his flawless sports performances, the silence that had infected their house was always sitting at the head of the table.
Jenny recalled that the dinner was her favorite, a roasted chicken, rosemary potatoes, French green beans. But she had no appetite—something she had been hiding from both her parents. She swallowed a small bite of food, then answered, Fine.
Her father stared at her. I’m quite certain he was unaware of this, but Jenny said he’d been doing it since they returned from Block Island. She said she could feel him studying every muscle of her face for clues. She became acutely aware of her expressions, knowing each one would result in some conclusion. Was that a slight smile at the corner of her mouth? Maybe something good had happened today. Was that a twitch in her eye? A grimace? Was she feeling annoyed by their questions like every teenage girl at every table everywhere? And mostly was there anything there to evidence the unrest that she had not been able to chase away? She had become very adept at hiding it.
She looked up to give him what he wanted—a benign smile. He smiled back, and when he did, Jenny said she could see the anguish that had lived in his eyes since that night in the woods. She wondered if he saw hers, too. If he did, they both still smiled at each other and pretended not to see.
What Jenny did not know was that her father was not studying her face. He was staring at her face, that part is true, but only to mask the fact that he had again noticed her hand twisted behind her back, rubbing the small scar where she had been engraved like a trophy.
Her mother continued the conversation.
I saw the cutest dress at Taggert’s today! Maybe Saturday we can go and look at it? Unless you have plans with a friend? Any plans, sweetie?
Jenny believed, and I think she was mostly accurate, that her mother had moved on quite nicely. Though her frustration with the tension that Jenny and her father created could be deciphered by
