Lucky

Lucky Read Free Page B

Book: Lucky Read Free
Author: Alice Sebold
Tags: Personal Memoirs
Ads: Link
the tears leak out as she gave me what I needed most, a small smile to acknowledge my joke.
    It was the first thing from my old life that I recognized on the other side. It was horribly changed and marked, my friend's smile. It was not free and open, born of the silliness our smiles had been all year, but it was a comfort to me. She cried more than I did and her face became mottled and swollen. She told me how Diane, who, like Mary Alice, was five ten, had practically lifted up the small RSA in order to get my whereabouts out of him.

    "He wasn't going to tell anyone but your roommate, but Nancy was up in your room, passed out."
    I smiled at the idea of Diane and Mary Alice lifting up the RSA, his feet doing a wild walk in the air like a Keystone Kop.
    "We're ready," Dr. Husa said.
    "Will you stay with me?" I asked Mary Alice.
    She did.
    Dr. Husa and the nurse worked together. Every so often they needed to massage my thighs. I asked them to explain everything they did. I wanted to know everything.
    "This is different from a regular exam," Dr. Husa explained. "I need to take samples in order to make up a rape kit."
    "That's evidence so you can get this creep," the nurse said.
    They took pubic clippings and pubic combings and samples of blood and semen and vaginal discharge. When I would wince, Mary Alice squeezed my hand harder. The nurse tried to make conversation, asked Mary Alice what she majored in up at the school, told me I was lucky to have such a good friend, said that being beaten up like I had would make the cops listen to me more attentively.
    "There is so much blood," I heard Husa say worriedly to the nurse.
    As they did the combings, Dr. Husa said, "Ah, now, there is a hair from him!" The nurse held the evidence bag open and Dr. Husa shook the combings into it.
    "Good," the nurse said.
    "Alice," Dr. Husa said, "we are going to let you urinate now but then I will have to take stitches inside."
    The nurse helped me sit up and then scooted a bedpan under me. I urinated for such a long time that the nurse and Mary Alice made a point of it, and laughed each time they thought I'd stopped. When I was done, what I saw was a bedpan full of blood, not urine.
    The nurse covered it quickly with paper from the examining table.
    "You don't need to be looking at that."
    Mary Alice helped me lie back down.
    Dr. Husa had me scoot down so she could take the stitches.

    "You'll be sore down here for a few days, maybe a week," Dr. Husa said. "You shouldn't do much, if you can avoid it."
    But I couldn't think in terms of days or weeks. I could only focus on the next minute and believe that with each minute it would get better, that slowly all of this might go away.
    I told the police not to call my mother. Unaware of my appearance, I believed I could hide the rape from her and from my family. My mother had panic attacks in heavy traffic; I was certain my rape would destroy her.
    After the vaginal exam was completed, I was wheeled into a bright white room. This room was used to store large, incredible machines with lifesaving abilities, all shining with stainless steel and spotless fiberglass. Mary Alice had gone back out to the waiting room. I noticed the machines and their details, how clean and new they seemed, because it was the first time I had been alone since the wheels of my rescue were set in motion. I lay on the gurney, naked under the hospital gown, and I was cold. I was not sure why I was there, stored alongside these machines. It was a long time before anyone came.
    It was a nurse. I asked her if I could take a shower in the shower stall in the corner. She looked at a chart on the end of the gurney, which I hadn't known was there. I wondered what it said about me, and pictured the word RAPE, in bold red letters, written diagonally across the page.
    I lay still and took shallow breaths. The Demerol worked hard to relax me but, still dirty, I fought back. Every inch of my skin prickled and burned. I wanted him off of me. I

Similar Books

Embrace the Fire

Tamara Shoemaker

Scrapbook of Secrets

Mollie Cox Bryan

Shatter

Michael Robotham

Fallen Rogue

Amy Rench

Dylan's Redemption

Jennifer Ryan

Daughters of the Nile

Stephanie Dray

At Home with Mr Darcy

Victoria Connelly