Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [3]
We spend most of the first week together, but Mike’s job requires him to return to the city to work some days out of his office. I had hoped that he could stay the whole time, to protect me from … myself. Outwardly, I seem like a calm, tanned, and happy mom on vacation, but the demons swirling in my mind are slowly taking over, and memories I have tried to suppress for so many years are now as clear as the movie I rented last week. In fact, the memories are just like a movie on a constant loop. I see myself as a freshman at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Over and over, in slow motion, I see myself struggling under this stranger and I cannot for the life of me press the STOP button. That’s the only way I know how to describe it.
When Mike is around during the week, we get a sitter and go to dinner, then walk the beach at Ditch Plains in Montauk for hours, snapping photographs or just simply touching fingers and breathing, looking at each other for a safe haven, a decision, something. The letter goes with me everywhere.
One night, yet another of insomnia (a legacy of the rape that has lasted for over twenty years), I go swimming at three A.M., blasting Coldplay’s X&Y for an hour by the pool. Exhausted, I dry off, throw on pajamas, brush my teeth, and stumble into our bed, leaving the letter on the terrace dining table where we have been eating grilled fish and burgers each night. Sleeping fitfully, I am not aware that morning has arrived until I hear a yelp from the deck, where Mike is cleaning up from our Scrabble game the previous night. The humidity on Long Island is legendary and oppressive, and my letter is now soaked, the ink on the outside running in tiny streams down the envelope. I’ve read the letter countless times by now and it’s committed to memory, but for whatever reason, I feel I have to preserve that piece of paper. We rush it inside like a trauma victim and blot it with dishtowels. It dries with a crunchy finish, but it’s intact, and the spidery handwriting is still clear.
From then on I’m even more vigilant, rarely allowing the letter out of my sight. (When I go through snapshots now from that late-summer vacation, I see a photo of me in a bikini, with a pink crocodile bag in front of me, and, yep, that’s the letter right on top.) I won’t even go swimming in the ocean unless someone is watching the bag with the letter. This means that Mike and I have to take turns swimming with Ava, the three of us never playing in the surf together as a family. The letter goes out to dinner with us. I unfold it and surreptitiously read it in restroom stalls all over East Hampton, just to make sure it’s still the same and hasn’t morphed into something else. If you recite or read anything enough, it begins to lose meaning. I realize I am slowly—well, maybe quickly—losing my mind. But after thinking and stewing and not sleeping, I’ve made a decision: I am going to reply. I need to know he’s actually in Las Vegas and not creeping outside my door. That’s it. End of story.
I’m not sure Mike would support this decision, so I decide not to tell him until after I’ve done it. My rationalization is that this happened to me before meeting him and it is my right to handle the situation however I please. I don’t feel guilt, just a sense of great purpose.
On September 19, 2005, after putting Ava to bed, I’m sitting with my legs dangling in the pool, staring at my shell-pink pedicure in the turquoise water. Puffing surreptitiously on a contraband Marlboro Ultra Light (I quit years ago), I click out the e-mail on my BlackBerry with my thumbs.
SUBJECT: Your letter
Mr. Beebe: I am in receipt of your letter. Please tell me how you can live with yourself. Tell me why you did what you did to me. My life was terribly altered by the fact that you raped me and I want to know why you did it and why you are reaching out to me now. Why didn’t you just confess