Broken (4 page)

“You’re gonna pay for that”, he says, readying himself to come at me.

There is a rage inside me that is unstoppable. I’m on him again, and before he has time to react, I’ve knocked him back to the ground with a whirlwind of punches. This time I don’t let him get up. I kick him in the ribs and put my boot down twice across his face, breaking his nose into a bloody pulp.

I can’t see anything through my fogged up glasses, but patches of red and my fists pummeling so quickly against his face he doesn’t even have time to breath between impacts. Eventually, after I’ve laid into him for a good two or three minutes, I feel someone grab me from behind and pull me off him.

Brendan puts me in a headlock while Peter and Martin tend to the guy on the floor.

“Easy champ”, Brendan says. “Take it easy.”

Erin has her hand over mouth. Rachel is ashen white. Claudia and Jacklyn can’t even look.

“Fuck, Ethan”, Eric says. “What the fuck did you do?”

From behind me, I hear Martin calling for an ambulance.

2
5 October 2015. Forty four days after.

The swelling on my knuckles has gone down, but the red marks are still there. I’m rubbing them when I realise Katy is trying to talk to me.

“Are you ok, Ethan?”

Like I said before, I zone out. It’s like I’m disconnecting from the world. I guess I should tell my doctor about it again.

“Yes, I’m sorry”, I say. “I was a little distracted.”

“Did you hurt your hand?”

I pull them both away out of sight, putting them into my pockets. “You know what? A little”, I say. “I did something stupid over the weekend. You know I’ve got this bag strung up in the basement, I decided to go at it without any gloves on. Let me tell you all something, it’s a real stupid idea.”

Lying comes much more easily than I ever thought it would. I’m good at it. I’m good at pretending everything’s ok. Katy gives me a smile, but she matches it with a look of concern like she’s even more worried about me than usual.

There’s a new girl in the group today. Someone I haven’t seen before. Another one of us that’s had their life turned on its head without warning. Katy introduces her as Jo.

“Hi”, Jo says and gives a kind of reluctant smile and a nervous wave of her hand. Katy asks if she wants to say anything before we begin, but Jo declines.

It took me three sessions to open up, and even then they still don’t know what’s really going on with me. Most of us want to listen to other people’s problems, we don’t want to speak about our own.

We go around the group to introduce ourselves.

“Hi”, I say. “I’m Ethan. My wife was raped and murdered and I wasn’t there to protect her.”

I don’t say that last part. I just tell her my name and look to the person to my right. It’s enough, for now. It’s not much more than I’ve been left with.

Part of the reason that I keep coming back to this group is because Katy isn’t just a therapist, she’s one of the group too. She’s gone through pain in the same way all of us have and come out the otherside.

We talk about normal stuff. The weather, what we did at the weekend, anything new that’s going on in our lives. Most people think that during these kind of things, the participants spend all of their time talking about what happened to them, but that hardly ever happens. I was surprised the first time too. I expected it to be a lot less light hearted than it is. I find myself watching Jo as we talk, just to see how she reacts to it all.

She looks like a nice girl. Perhaps just out of University. Too young to have to deal with what’s going on in her life right now. She looks strong, but all of us are only strong to a certain point. You bend something the right way it’s going to snap.

They put six stitches in that boy’s forehead, three more in his lip. I broke his nose, dislocated his shoulder and fractured his eye socket. I’ve never been in a fight before in my life. I didn’t even know how to punch until I watched a youtube video. Alice would have been horrified. Martin drove me away from there as soon as it happened. I haven’t spoken to anyone else since, but I know what they’ll all think. That’s why I knew it was a bad idea.  

Everyone is looking at me again. The whole group is smiling. I drift up to them, dreamily. “Huh?” I say, lazily.

Katy raises her eyebrows and I realize someone is stood behind me. I turn quickly and see Patricia holding a small cake with a candle in it. I don’t know how I’ve missed her sneak off and set it up. It’s like the conversation has jumped to a point in the future.

“Happy birthday”, she says.

“Oh, wow”, I say. “That’s so kind. How did you know?”

“It’s on your admission sheet. I hope you don’t mind?” Katy says.

“No, not at all”, I say. “This is. Unexpected.”

There is a card and a small present too. It’s a pair of running shorts and gloves for the cold weather. I’m touched by their generosity, and I tell them so. Patricia makes me put the gloves on, which I do so, forgetting about how raw the skin on my knuckles looks. I know she sees it, but she’s polite enough not to comment. They want me to put the shorts on as well, and for a while I refuse, before pulling them over my jeans just to see if they fit properly. They do.

“Now you won’t get cold over the winter”, Paul says.

“Right”, I agree. “They are just what I needed. Thank you so much.”

Paul’s in a similar situation to me, only it wasn’t his wife that got murdered, it was his daughter. She was eight years old when someone took her on her way back to school. That was two years ago and they still haven't found her. No-one wants to tell him she’s probably dead, but I’m sure everyone thinks it. Paul’s been coming here the longest. He’s a good guy, broken apart by something terrible. He’s getting on now though, he’s pulled himself through the worst of it. At least that’s the impression he gives to the group. Inside his head it could be something different entirely.

It’s a good session. Even Jo joins in by the end of it, not to talk about what happened to her, but just to show she’s willing to participate. She laughs when everyone else laughs, she listens when someone wants to talk, especially about how they feel or what they are going through, or what difficulty they have come across that week that they are struggling to get their head around.

Sometimes I wonder what they think of me. Alice used to describe me as determined, focused and obstinate. Sometimes, if she was being intentionally negative, she’d use the word inflexible. I know what I’m like. Once I want to achieve something, everything else gets left by the wayside. If I have something in mind, I’ll dedicate myself to that one thing until I feel like I’ve got it done. That used to drive Alice mad sometimes, but it was what got us together in the first place. I didn’t give up on her.

The session ends, and everyone goes their separate ways. Jo gives me a smile and a wave before she’s out of the door and back to her own life. I find myself thinking about her on the way back home. Alice would have liked her. I do that with every new person I meet. I think about what I think of them, and then I think how Alice would have appraised them.

‘Polite’, Alice would have said. ‘Well mannered’. ‘Pretty.’

Martin’s working when I get back home. He was all set to leave on the weekend, but because of what happened he’s decided to stay a little bit longer to look out for me. I don’t even mind. I like having him around. He’s understanding, non judgemental, caring. He has the same qualities Alice had. He’s set himself up in the spare room, and has pretty much taken over the office. I don’t need it now anyway. I do my research on my laptop, and I keep everything I find in a folder I’ve buried so deep on my hard drive not even a computer whizz-kid like Martin would be able to find it.

“Hey”, he says, spinning out from under his desk to face me. “How was the session?”

“They got me cake”, I say. “And these.” I show him the gifts.

“Damn, Ethan. That’s good of them.”

I nod in agreement. “They’re good people”, I say.

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah”, I say, but I don’t feel it.

Sadness comes in waves, and sometimes it’s upon me before I get any kind of warning. I make an excuse to leave and head up to my room. Martin knows when to leave me alone.

Now that I’m not working, I sometimes find the days are hard to fill. I was given compassionate leave for three months fully paid after Alice was murdered, and although I don’t feel ready to go back, I miss having something to suck away my time.

2
7 October 2015. Thirty days after.

A month has passed. I’ve begun my therapy sessions, although I found I was incapable of doing anything in the first group meeting apart from nodding and smiling, and I’ve told my parents, without going into specific detail, about what happened to me that night.

Mom has not stopped fussing, constantly phoning me to check that I’m alright, that I’m at home, that I’m not planning to go out alone, and Dad has done nothing but fight for justice on my behalf, putting himself in contact with lawyers, police officers, government officials and anyone else he feels has some vague responsibility for bringing the perpetrator to justice, as though the whole thing is a game he’s determined to win.

The therapy isn’t at all like I expected. The first session was laidback and casual. There are six of us in total, two men and four women, including the leader. I thought I might have been the youngest one there, but I wasn’t. It’s obvious that we are all broken, distracted somehow, trying to heal. I’m looking forward to the next session, I might be brave enough then to open up.

Alex has given me as much time as I need to come back to work. The time at home is killing me, but I know I’m not ready to step back into the office and risk another breakdown. I’ve been doing some things from home, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate. Mom set me up an appointment with her therapist - I didn’t even know she had one - but I decided not to go. I’m not ready for that yet either.

My doctor is the only other person that knows. The test results went to my GP through the internal computer system, and I was advised to see her for a follow up appointment on post trauma care.

I’m not pregnant, which is the good news. I hadn’t even considered it as a possibility, but during those days after it happened, I wasn’t thinking about anything much other than how much I hurt. The bad news is there was nothing left inside me for them to take a DNA sample. I washed it all out before they could get in there and collect it. The tests I did at the hospital where they pulled me apart and scraped cells off the wall of my vagina? Completely and utterly unnecessary.

The police call but I don’t pick it up because I think it’s Mom. I get the feeling she thinks I’m somehow spending my days being completely reckless, which was what got me into trouble in the first place. The truth is, beyond shopping for groceries at the local store, the doctor's appointment and the one therapy session, I haven’t been more than two or three blocks from the apartment, and I haven’t been out at night at all.

To tell you the truth, I’m fucking terrified. Dad needn’t have checked the windows or the doors, because I check them frequently. I sleep with a knife under the bed and I’m even thinking about buying a gun. Anyone who knows me knows that is completely out of character, but like I said before, my life has changed and I didn’t ask for it. I’m not the same Jo anymore at all. I’d move back in with my parents, but my life is here. I don’t want them to think I’m weak either. It would just make everything worse.

I listen to the answer phone message three times.

“Hi, this is a message for Joanne Cobb. Hi Joanne, this is Detective Borowski over at Harvard County station. I just thought I should let you know that this morning we arrested someone in connection with your case. They’re being charged tomorrow, and it’s almost certain they will enter a plea of not guilty. Joanne, I think this guy is our man, so it looks like it’s going to end up going to court. I just thought I should get you prepared for that eventuality. Anyway, you can call me on this number or the number at the top of the statement sheet to discuss how we proceed.”

3
0 October 2015. Thirty three days after.

I still haven’t called the police back. They rang again, the day after that first message, to leave another. This time Borowski told me that the man they arrested was charged with six counts of rape. He entered a plea of not guilty, and was given bail pending trial.

I don’t know his name, but I know that even if he
is
the man who assaulted me, he’s free until his case goes to trial. That could be anything from six weeks to sixty. It may never end up there. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to face it again, or him. I want to forget about it and move on with my life.

Rape. Sexual assault. Violation. These words spin around my head like planets orbiting the sun.

Dad calls the home phone. He calls my mobile when I don’t answer it. He leaves a text message. “Have you heard!! We’ve got him!!”

I feel sick. I barely make it to the toilet bowl before I vomit. Why can’t anyone understand this is already over for me?

But then I guess it’s not, and it never will be.

2
November 2015. Fifty days after.

I’ve been looking at statistics. Rape is defined in many different ways by the different agencies that collect the data. This means that in America alone, depending on which definition is being used, there were, in 2014, either 85,967 reported rapes or 365,872. The larger number includes sexual assaults without penetration. According to one charity set up to combat violence against women, one in six women have at some point in their lifetime experienced either an attempted or a completed rape, and 27% of rapes occur in the victim’s homes.

Only 25% of reported rapes result in arrest and only 5% of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. Only 5% will get any kind of justice for what they have done.