Jane Doe January (11 page)

I probably make people uncomfortable.

Small things reassure me. One old friend from home wishes me luck for trial, and refers to Fryar as “this ‘person,'” putting “person” in quotes. I appreciate the dehumanizing. Going up against a stranger, particularly a serially violent stranger, is easier than going up against one's peer. It's like those sci-fi movies that make it comfortable to cheer violence because the enemies aren't like us: they're aliens who want to destroy the world.

Fryar's Staten Island years continue to elude me. I can't find any address for him there, or any obvious family connections. But he must have lived there, at least some nights, with a friend or girlfriend maybe. Geographically, Staten Island isn't someplace you wander into or pass through without a reason.

His 2002–2005 prison time for his drug conviction there is confirmed by the New York Department of Corrections, but the crime itself has no record in the Richmond County court system. I pester them. They mention other charges attached to Fryar: a 1985 driving citation, a 1985 disorderly conduct, and a 1986 sealed case.
Sealed?
I'm not sure if the guy on the phone was supposed to say that out loud. The sealed case at first sounds intriguing, but it turns out that only juvenile, insignificant, or dismissed cases are likely to be sealed. Fryar wasn't a juvenile, so the sealed charge, whatever it is, must be simply unimportant or even not true.

My last effort to confirm the details of the conviction for which he was imprisoned in 2002, a quickie online “background check” for criminal history, turns up an arrest and guilty plea that matches the county and the drug charge I'm looking for, but with surprising dates: August 1986 arrest, and a guilty plea in June 1987. Why would there be a fifteen-year gap between plea and serving his sentence?

I suppose it could be that this happened twice, in the same place, sixteen years apart; but why would the 2002 case not be showing up, either in the county clerk's records, or in whatever records are used in the background check? And why would the incarceration for the 1987 guilty plea, which carried a sentence of three to six years, not be in the department of corrections database? That database has Fryar's rape incarceration from 1977 to 1984, so it's not a matter of the data not going back far enough.

If the 2002 date in the department of corrections source is just wrong, and this all refers to one case in the late eighties, that doesn't fit either. CODIS wasn't started until 1994, and New York didn't start collecting offender DNA to put into it until 1996. Even then, New York only put in the DNA of convicted murderers and rapists, not dealers. It took years for New York's net of qualifying offenses to widen enough to catch Fryar in it. So, the 2002 incarceration must be right, or at least more right than not. There simply has to be some conviction around that time to have gotten him into CODIS.

Then what about the thing in the eighties? Is this the sealed case? Why on earth would an adult's guilty plea to a felony be sealed?

Weirder, the “disposition date,” which is supposed to be the date that the case was decided, and which is listed right under the 1987 guilty plea, is Halloween 1996, nine years later. Then there's a further gap of six years before the consequent imprisonment. Something odd had happened in Staten Island.

I e-mail Evan to ask if he has any solid knowledge of Fryar's legal past. This is all public information, so it's no betrayal for him to share it with me if he knows it; but I'm acutely aware that it looks strange for me to ask. I'm afraid that he'll ask in return, “Why do you want to know?” I worry, when he doesn't ask, that he's thinking it.

All of this could be simple if someone just asked Fryar directly
for his basic life facts. It's impossible for me to do, both in that it's not allowed for me to communicate with him, and in that I couldn't bear to even if it were. No one else is going to ask him for me; no one else cares. The police and the district attorney have everything they need: they know what he did to me and to Georgia, and they know where he is now. That 1976 rape only matters because it changes his sentencing range. Everything else, literally everything, is irrelevant, to everyone except me. And, I suppose, to Fryar.

His arrest this past September was much more than just finally catching him. They'd finally
identified
him. For more than twenty years, I hadn't known who he was. The possibility of now learning what urged him on, what directed him to me, and what he got out of it, is electrifying.

I keep myself in check. My methods don't even involve leaving my house, which is already an ocean away from him. I treat this investigation as if he were dead, or even deeply in the past, like an academic speculating on the life of an ancient using only chipped paintings from the wall of a tomb.

I find his sister.

At first I hadn't noticed her among his Facebook friends, because he doesn't publicly identify family and she doesn't have the same last name anymore. Something else she doesn't have: any privacy settings. All of her posts, photos, and information are entirely open.

Up until now, everything I've found has been distant-feeling: addresses, arrests, numerous abandoned attempts at social media. This spareness fit how I remember him: he appeared, then he disappeared. He only exists in my experience as the thing that he did, nothing else.

But his sister seems to love him.

When she first joined Facebook, in 2009, she did what many do: posted a flattering photo of herself (nine years out-of-date) then a
flurry of pictures of special moments, such as her high school reunion, and family highlights. They make me catch my breath.

There's adult-but-very-young Arthur in a tuxedo with a lapel flower, with smiling friends, seeming to be on his way to a prom, or maybe a wedding, some formal event.

There's older-than-that-but-younger-than-now Arthur playing guitar with the Drifters. His suit doesn't go with their matching outfits, so it wasn't official; but he's onstage with them, enjoying himself hugely, probably as a let-someone-from-the-audience-give-it-a-go sort of thing.

It makes me angry. How can someone who has friends and family, how can someone who has music, claim the desperation that is the only excuse I can imagine for what he did? I write characters who do bad things, and they do them because their worlds are so small that they think they
must
do what they do. They
need
something, desperately. I look at him playing a guitar, I look at him happy, and I think:
How dare you?

The formal portrait photo of their parents has only Arthur's sister in it with them, so she's likely the oldest. According to various Mother's Day and Father's Day posts of hers over the years, their dad died in 1977, at age fifty-two, when Fryar would have been on his way to prison for second-degree rape if not in prison already, and their mom died in 1983, at age fifty-six, the year before he got out. Those ages are awfully young for death.

Arthur's sister didn't post anything about him when he was arrested this past September. To be fair, neither did I. Both of us just kept posting in our usual way: I continued on about kid stuff, book stuff, and cats; she posted more all-caps religious encouragement with multiple exclamation points.

I stopped posting entirely after the January hearing, though plenty has happened that I could have noted: Easter celebrations; W.'s new and awesome shark pajamas; S.'s first paintball battle for
his thirteenth birthday. But it feels like lying now to write about anything that isn't the upcoming trial. I can talk about other things, and successfully do things that have nothing to do with Pittsburgh, but writing is different. Writing is where I'm most honest and most selfish. Right now, all I want to write is this.

Googling the death years of Fryar's parents, I discover that his dad's name is the same as my dad's.

Now that I'm a generation back, the genealogical sites can help. Besides the many Fryars from Beacon, there are a bunch from nearby Newburgh, just across the Hudson River. Newburgh is where Arthur was arrested in 1976.

I can't stop looking at the tuxedo and guitar pictures. Now I think that the formalwear photo is likely the four siblings, two brothers and two sisters, rather than two couples. Comparing it to a more recent photo of the four, there are confirming similarities. Given the age differences between them, a thirteen-year spread from oldest to youngest, Arthur must be at least midtwenties in that pic. He went into prison at age twenty-five, so if the picture was snapped just before then the younger sister would be at most a grown-up-looking fourteen, which I suppose is possible. I'm pretty terrible at guessing ages. The other option is that Arthur was out of prison there, in his thirties, with the younger two in their early twenties, but it seems like the kind of photo that a parent would take. By the time Arthur got out of prison, both of their parents were dead.

I stare at the candid pictures, of Arthur joking around in black tie, Arthur in a suit with a guitar. That's what his side will try to show in court, that version of him: Arthur dressed up, Arthur who has family to pose with or snap his picture. I wonder if any of them will be at trial. I'll recognize them if they come.

I've been worrying about what he'll wear in court, and these
photos help me to adjust in advance to what it will be like to see him like that, in clothes that one would wear to an important meeting or a special event. Gavin wears a suit to visit customers in Asia. S. wears black tie for performances. That's the point of putting male defendants in suits: suits make someone look responsible, respectable-until-proven-guilty; they're for people with good jobs or special skills, with places to go. It's been panicking me, thinking about having to see Arthur Fryar like that, and to see other people seeing him like that. I suppose that's what my testimony is for: to make everyone see what he's capable of, however he tries to show them otherwise with his clothes and controlled manner.

I know that it was stupid to think that his playing guitar was shocking, that “music” is supposed to be enough to keep someone from doing awful things. I just couldn't help it. Art to me—any art—is such an obvious outlet that it's difficult for me to think of someone having an ability to express themselves, an ability to pour out what they feel and make something good out of it, yet not using it to divert their difficult emotions and thwarted desires. But just being able to play an instrument isn't that. It's a step toward that ability, but only a step. Knowing a few chords isn't the same as being creative, and even being genuinely creative can go badly wrong. Maybe if someone is that broken, creativity doesn't use up the bad feelings and desires, but legitimizes them and urges them on.

“Using up” difficult or confusing feelings is exactly what writing does for me. Once I've put something down in a logical, expressive way, it's out of my head. Then someone reads it, and understands, and I feel connected. After that, there's more to discover past those expressed feelings, things that I wouldn't be conscious of if I'd left myself stuck, keeping the first things to myself.

It wasn't always this way. I was originally secretive about the poetry I wrote in college. I was honest in it about struggle and weakness and wanting things I couldn't have, and was embarrassed
by all of that, even as I was proud of the way the words fit together. I only let strangers read my writing, specifically contest judges. When I started winning, I felt I had to show my work to one person who was alluded to in one of the poems, someone I admired tremendously. I didn't identify her by name, but anyone who knew us would recognize her. It wasn't fair for me to pursue publication including that one poem without her permission.

At the time, I'd honestly believed that anyone who read my poems would hate me afterward. I'd thought,
Well, this is it,
that that was the last day that she was going to want to be my friend, the last day that I would be able to fool her into thinking that I was the person I wished to be, the person I worked hard to come across as. I grieved in advance, but giving her the chance to veto my use of the poem was the right thing to do. I gave her the whole collection so that she'd know the context.

She read them all, overnight. The next morning, she said something that became the most significant fulcrum of my life: she told me that I'd described how she feels, too.

There's life before that revelation, and life after, as different as black-and-white Kansas and colorful Oz. Up until that moment, I'd thought that other people, she in particular but so many others, too, really were as they presented themselves, really were that good and that special, and so easily, too, and that I was the one who didn't match. When she admitted to being a little bit like me, I grasped the possibility that perhaps I was a little like her, and, instead of seeing the admirable people around me as massively important and myself as very, very small, I saw us all as suddenly medium-sized and far more complicated than I'd previously allowed.

As for what I'll wear in court, opposite Fryar's presumed suit, it has to be trousers and blazers for me. No dresses. I've got to cover my legs. I know that Fryar likes them, or at least that he did twenty-two
years ago, so I don't want him to be able to see them. And I don't want anyone else to think about them, when Aprill testifies about his saying that it's our legs that he remembers. I don't want anyone to peek at them and judge.

He hasn't pleaded guilty yet. That makes me wonder if he wants this confrontation as much as I do, and if he thinks about seeing me.

As cathartic as testifying will be, catharsis is not its purpose. There's a goal, and I have to keep that firmly in mind. Only a part of me will be useful at trial: the part that's soft, sad, and invites being defended by others. The rest of me, while useful elsewhere, is not required.

I make myself a little list of rules:

                    
1. Don't faint.

Really this just means eat breakfast, bring water, and focus.

                    
2. Don't swear.

Not even to use the swear words' literal meanings, no matter how stupid and textbookish the alternative words sound.

Those two rules are a start, from my experience at the hearing and from talking to Evan. I look up advice online for more, and write down the ones that surprise me:

                    
3. Review your past statements.

I'd thought that this would be a kind of cheating, but I suppose that after twenty-two years it's reasonable to refresh myself by looking over Bill's notes and my pages and pages of college poetry. The recent hearing transcript is what the defense is likely to be building their case on, so I should be careful to clearly match up with however I described things then. I don't want to give the defense any superficial confusion to work with.

                    
4. Look at the jury.

Wow, I do not want to do that. I think that that advice is for a different kind of witness. Besides, I doubt that they'll want eye contact with me when I'm saying the things that I'm going to say. The other listed option is to look at the attorney asking the questions and I like that one much better.

                    
5. Be polite to everyone, even the opposing attorney.

That will be difficult. I resent her already, even though I know that she's performing an essential role. Plus, even while I'm being polite, it will be desperately important for me not to trust her. She's not on my side. She'll likely be trying to trip me up. So, the politeness I'm to give her isn't like the openness I'm to give to Evan, where I'll answer anything he asks with detail and emotion, and let him lead me around. No, she works on behalf of the enemy, so I must be wary, but equally I must not harden myself in advance; if she then responds to my gentle civility by attacking with ugly implications or sneakily phrased questions, let the jury see me be hurt by it, on the spot. That can only help.

From there, it's easy to be reminded of this, from Evan:

                    
6. If anything's worth getting angry over, Evan will deal with it for me.

If he doesn't object, then it must be okay. I have to trust him.

And, lastly, from my own thoughts:

                    
7. Remember that the jury can see me whenever I'm in the courtroom, not just when I'm on the stand.

They'll watch me watching, watch me listening. I must remain aware of how I come across. They'll be judging me, too, not just him.

The trial is a month away. Leaving for the choir trip to Switzerland, with my trial bags packed, is just three weeks away.

I can barely wait. Basel, the choir's destination, is supposed to be gorgeous, all river and charm, but what I really want to see is Pittsburgh's courthouse. From descriptions online, it's beautiful, with a grand staircase and a courtyard fountain. It's comforting to think of the effort of design, construction, and cost that went into it. It makes the process of justice seem important to the city.

Special buildings make those who get to use them feel special. Even those who work there so often that they take the ambience for granted are affected, even if they don't realize it. They absorb the setting and the value that it confers on them. They know, even if only unconsciously:
This is the kind of place where I belong.

That's what living in Cambridge feels like. I started writing my first novel because I was trying to express my wonder at my new home in England. I love buildings, and the human choices that make buildings. As much as I appreciate nature, it's the deliberateness of architecture that excites me.

The choral festival will be a welcome buffer between home and court. Chaperoning is much less emotional than parenting, even chaperoning that includes one's own. The schedule will be tightly organized by others, and I will have distracting and cheerful obligations. The other adults who will be in the group all know about
what's ahead for me, all except for the accompanying organ scholar, who graduated last year and so won't have been around the college recently.

I plan and prepack. I put Fryar's tuxedo photo on my iPad, so I can practice looking at him. The dating- and casting-site photos freak me out a little; he looks a bit “bedroom eyes” in the way he's leaning. The youthful tuxedo snapshot, with, I think, his siblings, is unnerving, too, in that it shows him as a whole person with a silly side, someone with whom I should perhaps feel sympathy as a fellow human being, but it's at least more distant from when he was in my apartment.

I look ahead and protect the rest of June, the month I'll come home to, by scheduling extra meetings with John, and withdrawing from the lists of people who read the Bible in service and of parents who serve cookies and juice to the choirboys. I remember that, for a few services after January's hearing, I preferred to sit out in the nave, just listening, not inside the inner chapel participating in the recitations and hymn. I won't have that luxury of distance this time around. W. is being promoted from probationer to chorister, and will start wearing his white surplice while I'm in Pittsburgh. When I get back, he'll be keen for me to sit close, where he can see me seeing him.

My absolute favorite Bible verse is two words from the Old Testament: “Choose life.” It's from Deuteronomy, and in context is specifically about choosing to obey God or not, asserting that the former leads to life and the latter to death. It says, “I have set before you life and death . . . Choose life.”

I'm not a fan of the minutiae of Old Testament law, but I aspire to the compassion and goodness implied by the command to follow God. Sometimes the “life” option in a situation is easy to recognize, even if it may be hard to follow; sometimes there's no clearly right
thing to do, just several muddled options. But I look for life, and try to choose it when I see it, or at least to choose the most life-ish way.

I'm the kind of person who always wants to finish, who wants to get on the other side of whatever I'm in the middle of: I wanted to graduate, to marry, to get my babies born; I want to finish the next book and see it on the shelf. I resist and resent being in the middle of things; I do the doing only because it's the means to the end, and the end is what I want. I want it, I think, because only when something is finished do I really know if it was a success. While anything is still happening, still coming into being, it can fail or go wrong or just not become what I'm so hoping it will.

It finally occurred to me, though, that always wanting to be past things, to be finished, looking back, is like wanting to be dead. So I remind myself, often, to “choose life” instead: embrace being in the middle of things, not knowing the ending.

There's a lot that I'm waiting for, that I'm fantasizing about being past so that I can bask in their completion: I want confirmation from my publisher that my recent revision is acceptable. I want my sons' concerts and exams to go as well as they should. I want to get to trial, want it more than anything, but I mustn't rush through these weeks, rush past life.

On the Richmond County/Staten Island paperwork about Fryar's drug case, I find some index numbers that I haven't tried yet, so I call, again, just to be thorough.

I can't tell the difference between any of the men at Staten Island's county clerk or court offices. They all sound alike to me, harried and with strong, twangy accents. I bounce from county clerk to criminal court to supreme court, seeming to talk to the same man over and over again. The one at the supreme court tells me where to write a letter to request photocopies, and I pepper him with questions about the file in front of him, while he keeps
trying to get off the phone. He blurts out, in passing, that this case covers “years” and I pounce on that. “Well,” he explains. “The guy warranted.”

The word “warranted” confuses me, but his tone and the context explain it: Fryar jumped bail. He pleaded guilty in 1987, then never showed up to court for sentencing. I'm not sure if he lost his own money, or if he'd used a bail bondsman. If it was a bondsman, bounty hunters might have been dispatched.

That's probably why he went to Pittsburgh. That would explain why he changed his name.

It still doesn't explain why he was sentenced in 1996 but only started serving his time in 2002. Could he have escaped Richmond County courts twice?

He'd been in prison before, for the seventies rape, and must have been scared of going back in, scared enough that he gave up his name and family relationships to go on the run. During his Pittsburgh years, Fryar was, at best, lying low, unable to use his real name and so perhaps unable to get legitimate documents, to work jobs that require legitimate documents, or to collect veterans' benefits. At worst, he was being pursued by armed bounty hunters sent by his bail bondsman. He was, in any case, stressed, and separated from family support and any familiar places.

I'm glad he hates prison that much. I hope he's hating it right now.

The years bounce around in my head:

Because of when New York lowered the bar for the standard of submitting DNA to CODIS to include drug offenses, if he'd gone into prison in 1996, his DNA would likely not have been added. We might have never found him. I should be glad for whatever caused the delay before he served his time, for whatever reason.

But if he'd gotten his sentence over with without ever running
away, starting in 1987, he likely would never have come to Pittsburgh at all.

Goddamn Staten Island. Why couldn't they keep track of him? Either hold on to him or let him free. Why did they have to drive him on the run toward me?

As far as I can tell, no one in Cambridge thinks I'm lying, which I find really interesting. Shouldn't they? My stories are getting outlandish now, with armed bounty hunters added in. If you Google my name, nothing comes up about the case, because of victim anonymity. Yet no one has questioned my version of events, at least not to my face. I'm glad.

It's weird from the other direction, too. Over all of these years, whenever I phoned the Pittsburgh police with changes of address, no detective ever asked me to prove who I was. I called them, and they, always total strangers to me and to my case, just updated my contact information with whatever I said. When Honan told me about Fryar's arrest last September, he e-mailed me at an address I'd given him just weeks before. No one's ever asked me to prove that I really am Emily Winslow, that student from 1992. No one's asked to see a driver's license, a passport, anything, not even in court.

They do know for sure now that I'm me, because I submitted fresh DNA to be used to tease out the “me” from the “him” in the evidence. But if that hadn't been needed, if they'd still had a good 1992 sample of just me (as opposed to the combined-with-Fryar evidence), then really I could have been faking who I am entirely. I could have fooled even Bill. He could have fooled me, too. Twenty-two years is a long time. I wonder if Fryar would have noticed if someone pretending to be me testified.

My mind wanders. Lying and trusting interest me.
It's time to start another book,
I think, happy to have the urge to write fiction again.

We're waiting on the lab again.

They need to confirm that the evidence's DNA matches Fryar himself, from a swab taken at the hearing, not just his entry in CODIS. When that confirmation comes through, the defense has the option to delay the trial by requesting an expert to examine and dispute the results.

Evan and I have another Skype call scheduled so he can let me know what they decide. He's eager to push the defense to commit to or waive a delay. Fryar's choice; Fryar's power.

I continue to mentally practice what I should and shouldn't do in court, and prepare to be open and vulnerable in front of the jury. Over and over, I snap back to remembering, always, that I will also be in front of him. They're asking me to be soft and hurt in the same room with him, which can only flatter him, even after all these years.
You big, strong man. Look what you did to me.

Evan has to delay our call because he'll be in court too late to make our scheduled time. I know that that's fine, good even; I'll want him to delay calls about future cases when he's in court for me.

But it hurts and shocks me anyway. It's like when the kids were really small and Gavin had to travel. I would pace myself for his return date, and be just fine, only a little more weary, a little more wired as the day approached. Then the day would come and, the few times that he had to reschedule a flight, it was like a sudden drop, an extra step under my feet when I had expected to find floor. I'd meted out my energy to last till exactly then, and had had nothing left to stretch.

That's how I am with milestones in the prosecution, with scheduled points of contact. I plan to last exactly until the next one. As the day approaches—such as the extradition hearings, the DNA results, the pretrial conference—my body reacts. I feel overcaffeinated
and sensitive, waiting for news. But these things that mean so much to me are just items on the to-do list to those on the other end.

I have three siblings, but come from a pretty small extended family. My mother is an only child and my father has just one sibling, a sister. She's my only aunt and her much-missed, now-deceased husband was my only uncle. Their three children are my only cousins. I treasure them. To them, though, I'm just one of many cousins, because they have heaps on their father's side. They mean a lot to me; I mean much less to them.