Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [4]
I don’t sign it. I reason he’ll know who it’s from.
I look up at the trees, exhaling the pungent smoke. The backlight on my BlackBerry goes off and I cannot read my words. Panicked, I hit a button and they reappear.
After five minutes of swirling and splashing my legs around in the pool, I hit SEND.
The little checkmark, which means my mail has been sent, appears on the tiny screen.
Immediately, I regret my decision.
During the week, Mike is back in the city and Ava and I spend time together at the beach and the pool. She calls me Mama Dolphin in the pool and I try to impress her with some dolphin-style cavorting and diving. She thinks this is hilarious. I put her in the stroller and take her shopping in town. Retail therapy is a tried-and-true salve for me and I resurrect and polish off this talent with a vengeance. We go to Pomodoro’s for pizza and spaghetti and read Clam I Am by Dr. Seuss almost every night. She loves it because she loves all things ocean.
“Mama—read the part about the ocean being gray!”
She’s a sweet angel. I hate putting her down for the night because I am left to go downstairs to my room or to the pool with my questions, a BlackBerry, the letter, some fine Long Island wine, and no one to talk to. But I don’t want to talk about it. Yet. I told Mike after sending the e-mail that I had replied for my own sense of security, and he just nodded, not pressing me further. But as we try to enjoy our vacation, I obsessively check the BlackBerry. My biggest fear is that my time here in East Hampton will end and I will return to Greenwich to find William Beebe inside the house, hiding in my broom closet, the classic bogeyman. Or, worse yet, standing on my front porch, looking pathetic and southern frat-boy hangdog, begging for forgiveness in person. It strikes me how little I know of this person and his motives, and this scares the shit out of me. I certainly knew his motives back then.
And then it arrives. I see the “new mail” envelope icon in shiny bright yellow, I see his name, and I click on it.
SUBJECT: How do I begin?
“Dear Liz,” he opens. Liz? Now we’re on nickname terms? When he addressed me as Elizabeth in the letter, it felt more safely distant, somehow, since I never use my formal name.
You asked me to write about how I lived w/ myself in the wake of this incident. So I will.
He describes the selfishness of his youth, a time when he rarely thought about the consequences of his actions, especially when he had been drinking.
I always felt a tremendous guilt for the ways in which I imagined my conduct had damaged you, and for years too the only solution seemed to be the bottle … This is to say that the way that I lived with myself was of course not really living at all.
He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He wanted to right the wrongs in his past. It seems, reading his e-mail, that he regards his crime against me as just one more instance of collateral damage from the alcoholic life he has put behind him.
I gather from your response that you are indeed still quite angry, and you have every right to be. I can only hope that some good has come of this by your counseling other women, that they might be free of their own bondage to horrific memories.
He says he prays for me. He signs it “Will.”
I study his words. He has no way of knowing about my work with other rape victims, unless he has been doing his research well. It is dead silent outdoors, and the only sound I can hear is the roar of the blood rushing to my brain.
Now I keep staring at the damn BlackBerry, carrying the device with me everywhere. I don’t tell Mike that I’ve heard back from Beebe. I tell myself I don’t want to alarm him or cast a pall over his vacation. But we’ve never kept secrets from each other before. I wish I could just delete his e-mail, but I can’t bring myself to do it. More needs to be said,