Secrets of Harmony Grove (18 page)

Then came that last night. Maybe I went to shut them up. Maybe I went because I was bored, tired of the quiet, and ready for a break. Most of all, maybe I went because, as I watched them get ready, giggling about the out-fits they would wear and the nail polish they would use and the cute boys they hoped would show up again tonight, I suddenly felt about fifty years old. Life couldn’t always be about quiet and studying and getting ahead.

True, I didn’t drink and I couldn’t stand the smell of smoke and I wasn’t crazy about having to yell over the din of music. But even if I were more ambitious and disciplined than most, that didn’t mean I had to work 24/7. Soon I would face graduation and a career and the beginning of a mature, responsible, adult life. On this last night of spring break of my senior year in college, it was time for me to act not fifty or forty or even thirty but twenty-three. My age. It was time to act my age.

And so I went.

We ended up choosing a well-known restaurant/bar, a local landmark built on a pier jutting out over the water. The food was wonderful, the waiters young and friendly, the prices affordable. My friends and I had a great time at dinner, laughing and joking and flirting with every halfway decent guy that looked our way, just for kicks. We felt alive and beautiful, tanned and relaxed from our week in the sun.

After dinner, we moved from one side of the place to the other, from the noisy restaurant to the noisier bar, which was twice as big and ten times as full. The music was pumping, if way too loud, and soon all four of us were out on the dance floor, enjoying the moment, having a good time. The place was crowded, yes, not to mention hot, but there was something very freeing about being in the crush of all those bodies, in the dark, moving to the beat of the music.

A guy who had been making eyes at me in the restaurant all evening soon squeezed his way into the tight space next to me. He was cuter up close than he had been from across the room, with sun-bleached hair and tanned skin and teeth so white they practically glowed in the dark. Yelling to be heard over the music, he said his name was Damien and that he couldn’t believe his rotten luck, that a beautiful girl like me was starting my vacation on the very night he was ending his. Yelling back and forth, I realized that because he hadn’t seen me out partying all week, he assumed I had just come into town.

I told him no, that I had been here all week, spending my days on the beach and my nights with a good book.

“Lucky book!” he teased, laughing.

With all his compliments, Damien smelled of beer, and I could tell by
the look in his eyes that the bottle in his hand wasn’t his first of the evening. But he was cute and he made me feel like the prettiest girl not just in the room but in all of Virginia, and on that night I was trying very hard to act my age.

We ended up dancing together for more than an hour, at one point the dance floor so full that even when we wanted to take a break and sit down, we couldn’t get through the crowd to do so. I had started my evening with soda, and when we finally managed to squeeze our way off the floor and grab a table along the side, Damien offered to get me another. Back from the bar, he handed me an open cup of what I thought was cola. It smelled like cola. It tasted like cola. But soon the room started spinning, and Damien’s face, which had been looming close all night, began to go in and out of focus.

Later, much later, lab tests would show that the drink he brought me had indeed been cola. But somewhere between the bar and our table it had been modified with some Rohypnols, more commonly known as roofies. This stranger had roofied me.

At the time, all I knew was that if I didn’t lie down soon, I just might fall on the floor. Ignoring the cigarette butts and the sticky goo on the table’s surface, I simply folded my arms and laid them on the table, and then I put my head down. Damien’s arm was around me in an instant, and I was so relieved that he understood how badly I needed a little support and some fresh air. Practically carrying me from the bar, Damien moved more quickly than I would have thought possible, given the crowd, until we were outside.

The thing was, he kept going. Not only did he keep going but suddenly we weren’t alone. Others were coming with us too. Other guys, some of them very big and very drunk, all of them moving in step in a way that to my drugged brain almost felt choreographed.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice was telling me to run. I felt weak and confused, but finally I obeyed, breaking away and heading back down the pier toward the open-air restaurant. A number of people saw me; in fact, most of the diners that sat along the outside row of tables had a very clear view of a girl who was stumbling and running toward them. Some stared. One woman gaped, first in surprise and then disdain.

But not one person did a thing.

Later, one woman told police that she and her husband
wanted
to stop those boys from what they were doing, but they were afraid. Another said sure, she saw those boys heading out of there with that girl; she had thought about telling the manager or trying to stop them, but then she “saw that girl’s face and how absolutely plastered she was and figured she was getting just about what she deserved.” In the end, no one tried to help me at all.

When Damien and his friends caught up with me, they laughed and grabbed me and pulled me away, and soon the restaurant’s patrons were back to their meals, their chatter fading into the background behind us.

I must have passed out completely after that, because the next thing I knew, I was in a different place and time: not inside but out, not sitting on a chair in a bar but lying on my back on a gnarled old wooden pier, no longer surrounded by my friends but instead by a circle of Damien’s friends, drunken young men on every side, who seemed to be forming a human privacy wall around us. About the only constant between the before and after was Damien’s face. It was still looming too close, but now it was over me, looking down at me.

I screamed, a scream so loud and bloodcurdling that I couldn’t believe it had come out of my own mouth. He was struggling with my pants, which he couldn’t quite get undone or torn off, especially once I started fighting back. All I could do was scream louder and louder in the hopes that I would be saved, in the hopes that someone would hear me and rescue me.

But Damien had a plan for drowning out my screams. Later there would be testimony that said, essentially, he and his buddies had been trying to accomplish this very scenario several times during the week, but that something had gone wrong each time. In this their last try, they had covered every contingency. If the girl woke up too soon, and if she started hollering, they would simply holler louder, and hoot and laugh and cover the sound of their victim’s screams with the simple noise of a rowdy group of drinking buddies on a Friday night at the beach.

Though I clawed and scratched and fought as hard as I could, I was no match for the muscular Damien. I even heard myself growing hoarse, but it didn’t matter. When I could no longer scream, Damien’s buddies were
louder still, chanting amid the yelling, hopping up and down on the old wooden dock, stomping in a rhythm to match their chant.

Had they attempted to pull this off anywhere else that night, it would have ended differently. But because they chose to rape me on an older part of the pier that wasn’t used anymore, way out on the section that was dark and chained off and closed to the public, there were other factors at play.

Of course, I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that one moment I was pinned to the ground and fighting for my life, and the next moment that ground had dropped out from under me and I was falling.

Later, just to explain the complexities of that collapsing pier would take two days of testimony during the trial. But beyond the experts and their charts and the buck-passing city officials lay the truth: In the end, I was saved because of a lazy code inspector, rotting wood, and a crumbling underwater foundation.

My salvation wasn’t without a price. As the floor disappeared from under me, and screams erupted all around me, I felt the whoosh of flight and then the slam of water against my back as I struck the surface. Plunging into the depths, my arm was speared by a cluster of razor-sharp steel rods mounted in cement on the seafloor, pointing skyward just under the surface.

Bodies rained down all around me, many of them speared as well, the shower of rotted planks and other detritus hitting the water with splintering, thundering crashes.

I don’t know how I got loose. I don’t know how I got away from the shrieking, tumbling boys who in their panic were only managing to push each other under the water. I don’t know how I ended up half a block away, floating free in the Atlantic Ocean with my toes just touching the sand, the blood-red waves gently pushing me toward the shore, my arm a mangled pulp.

Somehow I made it all the way to the beach. Cradling my shredded and broken and bleeding appendage against me, I felt almost no pain. That would come later. All I knew then was that I had to get to safety, I had to get help, I had to get to a doctor before it was too late. Cursing the sand that kept shifting under my feet and slowing me down, I finally reached more solid ground, the sidewalk and then the street where a patrol cop on a bicycle just happened to be passing by. Already, someone had reported screams
and crashing sounds from the closed part of the pier. First responders were already on their way. But when that man saw me, saw my torn clothes, saw my bleeding arm, he immediately called for help.

Everything after that had been handled very well: police, ambulance, hospital, doctors, lawyers, counselors. Every step of the way, through every part of my ordeal, it seemed as if God was sending me the very people that could help me best, starting with a team of brilliant doctors at the nearest hospital who managed to reattach my arm and hand.

Eventually, I was released and sent back home, my care transferred to the hospital there. Of course, throughout everything, my family rallied around me like never before. My school deferred my classes for as long as I needed. My mother found me one of the very best Christian counselors in the country, who just happened to have an opening at her office in Bryn Mawr for three afternoons a week.

More surgeries followed, more pain than I could ever have imagined, but with the healing on the outside came healing on the inside as well. Even my three friends, who struggled mightily with their own guilt about that night, finally came around and understood that I blamed them no more than I blamed myself.

Everyone expected me to hate my attacker, to feel vindicated when we learned he had not survived his injuries and had died from internal bleeding. How could I explain that, dead or alive, Damien hadn’t been the only villain that night?

For starters, his buddies were more than complicit. At least most of them got their just desserts: All were hurt when the pier fell apart, several quite badly. Down the line, those who survived were charged and tried and convicted almost to a man.

Beyond that, though, were the others, those who didn’t facilitate or encourage what was happening but who saw it when it could have been stopped and chose to look the other way.
How
, I would rail in my darkest moments,
how could someone stand by and do nothing even as a girl is being dragged from a bar, nearly unconscious, by a group of drunken, rowdy guys
? Even if others in the bar hadn’t realized what was happening, what about the people in the restaurant? I knew they had seen us.

Those were the ones who never had to pay, who weren’t charged with any crime, whose only punishment for looking the other way once all was said and done was to endure a lifelong sense of shame that surely clung to them like the stench of bar smoke. They were all to blame for what happened to me, for what could have happened. If not for the collapse of the pier, I would have been raped, perhaps by the entire gang.

Seven operations later, though I had worked through the crisis, emotionally speaking, there were still many scars that lingered, both inside and out. My mangled arm was a constant reminder of the one night I decided to loosen up, abandon my standards, and act my age. The night that changed my life forever.

Now, standing at the window of my little room at the inn and looking up at a thousand stars, I remembered one session with my counselor, how angry she had become when I had referred to this hideous arm as my mark of shame. She kept insisting that it was not a mark of shame but one of survival.

Once I got into self-defense, shooting, and boxing, and I was strong and knowledgeable and better understood how to defend myself in
any
situation, I finally began to believe it. Eventually I decided to take it a step even further, telling myself that my scar wasn’t a mark of shame or of survival but in fact a secret mark of power. I wanted to get to the point where I could wear these scars under my sleeve as strongly and surely as Clark Kent wore an “S” hidden on his chest. I told myself that this was my best proof that in the end I wasn’t a victim but victorious.

Someday, surely, if I told myself that enough times I would finally come to believe it. Taking a deep breath, I took in as much air as I could, held it for a long moment, and then slowly blew it out.

Better.

I felt better.

As always, my counselor was right. I could move through the discomfort to the other side. I could trust God to be here with me as I did, to carry this burden for me.

But that didn’t mean this beast called up from the depths was going to stay back down. For the past ten years I had done everything humanly
possible to keep myself from feeling powerless. And then along came today, in which crisis after crisis managed to strip away any illusion of power and control that I had ever had. In a single day, my whole world had begun to crumble, not like the instant plunge of the pier, but more like the shifting of sands under my feet as I tried to get to shore.