Her: A Memoir (12 page)

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The police, a male and female pair of detectives, came the Monday after the rape. They called that morning to say they’d gotten a lead and arrested a suspect—Edgardo Hernandez. They needed Cara to identify some of his belongings. If she made a proper identification, she’d go to the station downtown and pick the suspect out of a lineup. Cara would also need to identify her own belongings collected at the scene and sign off officially on the items they’d taken into custody at the hospital. Her clothes: pants, panties, socks, my sweater.

Mom let the detectives in. She offered them coffee, brownies, a sandwich. They carried my sweater in a clear, ziplock plastic bag. It was covered in bits of leaves and torn at the shoulders.

Cara looked at the evidence bags. “Sorry about your sweater.”

“I’ll find another,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

I’ve yet to find that sweater’s replacement. Nothing I’ve tried on or bought fits as well, or succeeds in replacing my memory of what happened to Cara.

We waited for Cara to identify Edgardo’s things. The detectives had gone inside his apartment and had found the clothes she’d described: a turtleneck sweater, dark jeans, a pair of plaid patterned boxer shorts. He’d been arrested and detained.

She’d given an excellent account. Hernandez was discovered because of my sister’s recollection of his garments. She’d told them he smelled of whiskey and wore a tan sweater. He’d pulled the collar up over his chin, to conceal his face. She’d gotten a good look at him, remembered the color and fit of his sloppy clothes. A twin is a perceptive observer. A twin learns how a person is made through watching, and then makes herself into a copy. Twins size people up. Observing keenly is a path to love and acceptance; for this, the twin keeps a sharp eye.

The female detective, Jennifer, wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d expected someone less stylish and groomed. She looked tough in her smart black pants. She was petite with round, sorry blue eyes that peered out from under the long wave of hair that covered one. I could tell by the way she stood and from her tone that she probably cursed without apology and held her own among her male colleagues during drinks at the bar. Jennifer quickly became my hero. She was not a drunkard; she was kind, empathetic, soothing, motherly, and assuring. Jennifer was calculating. Her senses were amped like a hound’s. She seemed to hear for miles and, like a hunting dog scenting prey, she already smelled her man. There was no question she’d get him.

I saw this clearly: Jennifer would kill the animal who’d done this to Cara. She’d do it with her own hands if she had to; she’d do it with her pistol, without remorse or hesitation, not only for justice but for a paycheck. I wondered who it was that had hurt her; it was written on her face that someone had.

Jennifer’s buttery blond hair grazed the handle of the gun she wore on her hip. Jennifer, tough and tender, looked down at the bags of Cara’s clothing. Jennifer, Venus De Milo standing in her clamshell, understood nakedness, saw the shame and fear in the room. We were relieved to know she was on the case. She told us she’d make her visit short and to the point. There was no need to linger.

She didn’t want a sandwich.

She laid the bagged items out on the coffee table and waited for her partner to reveal them one by one. I asked if I could have my sweater back.

“You’ll never see that sweater after today. Evidence stays in a vault at the station.” She looked at the sweater more closely. “This sweater looks expensive.” She set the bag down.

I thought of a college friend who had a job in an evidence room at a London police precinct. He’d told me all about the things they stored there. I remembered a few of the odder items: a bloody guitar someone had used to bash in the head of a lover, an empty box of matches used for arson, a murderer’s diary. There was a wheelchair they’d had for over a decade. An elderly man had used it to wheel himself off a cliff, a suicide who was depressed over Alzheimer’s. The wheelchair had somehow survived the fall. It wasn’t damaged in the least. The boys who worked in the evidence room liked to take it for rides around the building when the higher-ups weren’t watching. My sweater would soon be a casualty of an evidence room. I imagined strangers touching it, even trying it on.

We sat on the sofa: Mom, Kahlil, Cara, Jennifer, me, and the male detective. I can’t remember his name; he looked worried and hung his head, sad at himself for being a man in a world where men did these things. Cara sat in the middle and I sat on one side of her. Kahlil was on the other. The sofa was a green sectional and fit all of us easily. It was brand-new, but the fabric was ripped away at the corners, stuffing falling out. The cats had gotten to it, clawed it up. They’d torn into the sofa like they did every stick of furniture Cara ever owned.

Cara and Kahlil had purchased the sofa with money from their wedding. Cara had never owned one before. In college there had been a futon, and an ice-blue velour recliner she’d rescued from the street—but never a sofa, a
real
sofa. A sofa wasn’t just a place to lounge; the purchase of a sofa meant she was finally an adult.

Mom was smoking and Cara was chain-smoking. The living room was thick with smoke that wafted up to the ceiling and twirled in the air. Jennifer coughed and cleared her throat. The male detective’s eyes watered.

“This is embarrassing,” Mom said. “Cara doesn’t usually live like this.” Mom patted Cara on the shoulder and Cara pulled away. “Right, honey?”

“It’s fine,” I said, suspecting they’d seen and smelled much worse.

“This is nothing.” Jennifer handed my mother the tea saucer my sister had been using as an ashtray. She didn’t miss a beat.

I opened a window to clear the room. Air relieved the room of the burden of smoke, like fresh water from a mountain diluting a toxic stream. I pulled the bronchial inhaler I used for asthma attacks from my pocket and took a puff.

The male detective opened the first bag and pulled out the jeans. They were faded from years of wear, caked with mud at the knees. One of the back pockets had been ripped clean off the pants. Specks of dried brown blood flecked the legs. He must have been standing over her as he punched her pretty face.

Cara flinched at the sight of the pants, leaned into Kahlil’s arms and whimpered. She nodded, yes.

The detective pulled the turtleneck out next and held it up by the shoulders. The sweater hung limp and was large enough that it obscured his face. It was enormous, split at the seams. Edgardo must have worn it for years. It was filthy; the fabric had been exhausted by the task of containing him. The detective turned it around and stood up, holding the sweater to his side.

Cara moved to the edge of her sofa cushion and got a good look at the garment. She’d not yet changed from her pajamas. It had been four days and there was no convincing her to freshen up. She pulled a purple chenille throw blanket off the sofa arm and covered herself. She stood up and touched the body of the sweater. “Yes, that’s the one. The neck of the sweater kept getting caught in my mouth. I remember the texture.”

Our mother got up and went into the kitchen. She turned on the tap and water rushed loudly against the sink’s basin. I could hear her sharp, short sobs beneath the drumming tenor of the water’s tide. She opened the microwave and warmed her cooled cup of coffee, put away the untouched turkey sandwiches she’d made for the detectives. The fridge door banged shut. The microwave chimed. My mother walked slowly back to the living room, careful not to spill.

The detective placed the sweater back into the paper bag. “Thanks,” he said. “We have just one more item, and we’ll be able wrap things up.” He pulled out a pair of boxer shorts patterned with electric blue and black checks. The elastic waist of the shorts was coming undone; the inside band poked out through holes in the fabric.

Cara cried out at the sight of the shorts. They were a stand-in for the man, as close as she would come to sharing a room with him before the trial, two years later. Her voice warbled at its highest pitch. The sound moved up and then down in register, over and over, until she lost her breath and quickly caught it again. She beat her hands on Kahlil’s chest and screamed her throat raw. This time there were people to hear her.

Chapter 12

Albert ate too much

Barbara hit the booze

Carolina free-based crack

Duncan was depressed

Enid had an eating disorder

Floyd followed a Florida cult

Georgia gulped Geronimo

Harold slammed heroin

Inez bought Internet porn

Jared jacked a jeep

Kenny took Klonopin

Laura left her little ones

Mark snorted methamphetamine

Nancy nailed her neighbors

Otis smoked opium

Portia popped pills

Quincy needed Quaaludes

Rebecca repressed a rape

Stan sniffed glue

Trevor tripped on acid

Una underwent cosmetic surgery thirty times

Vera vacuumed on Vicodin

William wore nothing to work

Xavier took X

Yardley yearned for yellow jackets

Zach smoked Zambi

Getting to Cara was mostly a straight run out of New York City. Once the lights and smog and noise and the guilt of my weekday life, a life free of my sister and her rape, were behind me, I’d hit Interstate 91 and shoot through Connecticut, then Springfield and Holyoke to Northampton. Before long I was on her doorstep. It had been a year and a handful of months since October 18. I’d been making the trip back and forth for all of that time and had miraculously carved out a routine with Jedediah and work. I’d settled back into the city, my marriage, and graduate school. I worked every night in the darkroom printing color photographs of us until dawn. Cara limped along. She, too, was in a graduate program. I wasn’t certain how she completed her course work. I had the feeling that her passing was an act of mercy on the part of her professors.

And her workshop peers’ whisperings about her only increased her stress.

“I don’t understand why they don’t like me,” she complained to me over the phone. “I try so hard.”

“Maybe they think you’re teacher’s pet?” I consoled. She
was
her professor’s favorite. Cara had been given the largest scholarship the university had.

“I’ve heard some people think I’m having sex with her, my teacher,” Cara said proudly. “It’s better to have people gossiping about me than ignoring me, I guess. That means I’m on their minds.”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, at least I know how to dress myself,” Cara said. “So what if I get a little drunk.”

She told me how the grad students showed up to her dinner parties empty-handed, wearing jeans and beat-up shoes. Cara answered the door in floor-length cocktail dresses and flowers from the supermarket pinned into her hair. Kahlil manned the kitchen while she hosted out front. Everyone ate happily and heartily and waited for Cara to drink enough so that she couldn’t stand.

Cara had no inclination to spare those around her.

Her first appearance at school after the rape was at a reading for first-year fiction-writing students. Cara stood at the podium fat-lipped, arm in a sling, both eyes still blackened. She pulled out her pages and cleared her throat. “I’m Cara, for those of you I’ve not met,” she said. “I’m glad to be alive.” The crowd shuffled nervously in their seats. A few people glared at Kahlil, who sat rapt, watching his wife. Cara read a short story about an unhappy marriage and took a bow. Word was that Kahlil had roughed her up.

She and Kahlil had moved to Northampton immediately after the rape. They’d settled into a new apartment in a quiet suburban neighborhood, a pretty two-story white Victorian with a front porch and yard, a duplex. The street was named for a tree: cherry, oak, or maple, a tree that sounded solid and safe.

I made the drive weekly. I came to know each bend and curl in the road as well as I knew each of Cara’s needle-pricked veins. The prices and calorie counts of rest stop fast-food menus turned as familiar as pantry items. Radio personalities became old friends: I listened to Delilah. She had a song for everyone, sometimes the same one for different people in vastly dissimilar tragedies. “Wind Beneath My Wings” for a breakup, death, favorite teacher, war hero? Sure. But what was the song for a just-raped, drug-addicted identical twin sister in a doomed marriage?

There were no songs for us, only silence interrupted by the popping sound of prescription drug bottles.

I focused on the condescending calm of Delilah’s voice. On her breathy sigh of condolences and convincing. I knew better than to believe her. Conversion from the land of fire to the Lord’s would never be my escape. But her voice soothed me.

Have you lost faith?
Delilah purred into her radio microphone.
Have you lost hope?

Faith? Mine was broken on a trail of glass and leaves.

Hope? I feared having any. To lose one more shred of naïveté—that would be saying good-bye to innocence completely. I wasn’t prepared.

Cara’s dishes, crusted with food, waited, piled high in the sink. Cara herself waited for me stoned on the couch. She never said more than “Hey” when I arrived, as if I’d journeyed no farther to visit her than from next door.

“This house is nearly condemnable,” I’d say as I walked in the door. I never held my tongue. “This place should be boarded up, demolished!” I’d say.

Kahlil would sit at the kitchen table, crunching away at a bag of chips, reading the newspaper. The place wasn’t breaking health codes, but no one should live that way, especially not a young lady who used to tidy up pridefully, who had liked to be the “wife” taking care of the roost.

After the rape, tracked-in mud and snow salt shellacked the tiled floors. Pebbles of kitty litter became coated in the mud and stuck to the bottoms of bare feet. Animals whined in hunger. Spoiled milk curdled by the gallon. Soiled laundry tumbled out of baskets and closets, hung from the kitchen table onto the floor, and pushed open the doors of the china cabinet, which Cara was using as a makeshift closet. The china, packed away in the basement, awaited better times. The house was full to the rafters with clothes.