Denial Read Free Page B

been an error here. This is me, Jessica. I am not a grown-up! I should not be alone here. I am not a criminal!” But I was stuck in the dream. I couldn’t escape. I heard that buzzing sound of fluorescent lights. The sensation of cold when the speculum pierced, once again, the flesh that felt torn.
    Would I ever heal? No, I would not. I would become someone else.
    The laboratory reports indicate that sperm were detected in my underpants, my leotard, and my jeans. I do not recall whether they found sperm on my body, but they must have. How much of what I think I recall is correct? How much of it is a result of memory distorted by the Valium and sleeping pills the doctors administered to us afterward, or the chemicals my body produced, the chemicals that even now are distorting my features as I read the file, making me hard and tough?
    How much of what we think of as an admirable response to trauma—the “stiff upper lip”—is actually disassociation, the mind’s attempt to protect us from experiences that are too painful to digest? I can recall the facts, at least some of them. But I don’t feel very much. At least, the feelings I have are not kind. They are not sympathetic toward my fifteen-year-old self. It happened. It happens to a lot of women. I survived. Most women do. I am “strong,” but in those moments of strength, I don’t feel.
    I will admit that I am very afraid of one thing. Not just afraid. Ashamed. I am afraid that I am incapable of love.
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    This is not the first time I have read my police file. In 1994, when one of my neighbors thought she might have been sexually abused, it occurred to me that our rapist might have raped her, too. I asked the police for my then-twenty-year-old file, and they sent me part of it, including a barely audible audiotape. Even now, I haven’t found the courage to listen to it. There was nothing in the file to help my neighbor, and nothing in the file that helped me, at least not then.
    The first time I saw the file, it was incomplete. But now I have the whole thing. Everything is here—the things we had to tell the police, the things the police wrote down that they thought about us at the time. Only the names of suspects are blacked out.
    I have trouble reading it. The copy is bad, but that is really just an excuse. I have trouble focusing my mind, as if my brain were underwater. I have an urge to put it away. I force myself to read. Moments later I want to stop again. Again, I force myself to read.
    A wave of loneliness washes over me as I read. I felt so alone as a child. Our mother had died when I was three years old and my sister was two. We lived with our grandparents while my mother was dying, and stayed with them, after that, for a year. We moved out when my father remarried, a little over a year after our mother’s death. He married Lisa, the older sister of my best friend in nursery school. The marriage had been more orless arranged by my best friend’s mother and my grandmother. It was as if our father had married Mary Poppins. Lisa was young and bright and impossibly beautiful. I can still recall the comfort of resting my cheek against the smooth brown skin of her forearm. But it was not a good marriage. It lasted only six years. When I was twelve, our father married for the third time.
    Our father was in Norway with his new wife at the time we were raped. I remember this distinctly. That is why a babysitter was staying with us. She was supposed to be ferrying us around. The evening of the rape we had gone to Lisa’s house, as we did, once a week, after ballet. But Lisa went out to dinner that night, taking our half sisters with her. My sister and I stayed behind. We had homework. We asked the babysitter to pick us up. She was busy, she told us. I remember this. And I remember what I see here in the notes taken down by the police at the time: the babysitter didn’t believe us when we called again a